You might find some (or all) of the following quotes interesting:
“I cannot be the only person to be sickened by the sight of parties of psychiatrists standing at the airport desk with so many gifts with them that they might as well have the name of the drug company tattooed across their foreheads.” Prof. Mike Shooter, then President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (2005)
“It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked
“The concept of schizophrenia is so broad that two patients can share the diagnosis while having no symptoms in common … Research has also shown that psychiatric diagnoses are poor predictors of response to treatment, giving little indication of which patients will respond to which drugs. They are therefore hardly more meaningful than star signs …” Prof. Richard Bentall, Diagnoses are psychiatry’s star signs. Let’s listen more and drug people less
“No longer do we seek to understand whole persons in their social contexts — rather we are there to realign our patients’ neurotransmitters. The problem is that it is very difficult to have a relationship with a neurotransmitter — whatever its configuration. So, our guild organization provides a rationale, by its neurobiological tunnel vision, for keeping our distance from the molecule conglomerates we have come to define as patients.” Dr. Lauren Mosher, 1998 letter of resignation from membership of the American Psychiatric Association
“Mental healthcare must …. be provided on the basis of … the humanities, in which context and subject play a part to a much greater extent.” Prof. Tor Johan Ekeland, as cited in Beyond Best Practice: How Mental Health Services Can Be Better, p. 8.
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.” Prof. Carl Jung
“If we are seen as mere pill pushers and employees of the pharmaceutical industry, our credibility as a profession is compromised. As we address these Big Pharma issues, we must examine the fact that as a profession, we have allowed the bio-psycho-social model to become the bio-bio-bio model.” Dr. Steven Sharfstein, then President of the American Psychiatric Association
“For twelve years I ran a benzodiazepine withdrawal clinic for people wanting to come off their tranquillisers and sleeping pills. Much of what I know about this subject was taught to me by those brave and long-suffering men and women … It is interesting that the patients themselves, and not the medical profession, were the first to realise that long-term use of benzodiazepines [a family of tranquiliser drugs mostly prescribed for anxiety] can cause problems.” Prof. C. Heather Ashton
You can find additional interesting quotes here, here, here and also here.
