Mental Health Professionals Quotes

“Stigma against mental illness is a scourge with many faces, and the medical community wears a number of those faces.”
― Elyn R. Saks

“But that is what these people do - the Steves of this world - they all try and make something out of nothing. and they all do it for themselves.”
― Nathan Filer, The Shock of the Fall

“I have schizophrenia. I am not schizophrenia. I am not my mental illness. My illness is a part of me.”
― Jonathan Harnisch, Jonathan Harnisch: An Alibiography

“[Talking about Monte Rissell] ...and like Ed Kemper he was able to convince the psychiatrist he was making excellent progress while he was actually killing human beings. This is kind of a sick version of the old joke about how many psychiatrists it takes to change a light bulb. The answer being, just one, but only if the light bulb wants to change.”
― John E. Douglas, Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit

“Somehow the disorder hooks into all kinds of fears and insecurities in many clinicians. The flamboyance of the multiple, her intelligence and ability to conceptualize the disorder, coupled with suicidal impulses of various orders of seriousness, all seem to mask for many therapists the underlying pain, dependency, and need that are very much part of the process. In many ways, a professional dealing with a multiple in crisis is in the same position as a parent dealing with a two-year-old or with an adolescent's acting-out behavior. (236)”
― Lynn I. Wilson, The Flock: The Autobiography of a Multiple Personality

“Sadly, psychiatric training still includes far too little on the very serious psychiatric sequelae of childhood trauma, especially CSA [child sexual abuse]. There is inadequate recognition within mental health services of the prevalence and importance of Dissociative Disorders, sufferers of which are frequently misdiagnosed as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), or, in the cases of DID, schizophrenia.

This is to some extent understandable as some of the features of DID appear superficially to mimic those of schizophrenia and/or Borderline Personality Disorder.”
― Joan Coleman, Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder

“If the mind fits, shrink it.”
― Brian Spellman, Cartoonist's Book Camp

“My other client, whom I will call Teresa, thought Lorraine had MPD and hoped I could help her. Almost no one recognized this condition in those days.

Lorraine was forty years old and had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals since she was thirteen. She had had various diagnoses, mainly severe depression, and she had made quite a few serious suicide attempts before I even met her. She had been given many courses of electric shock therapy, which would confuse her so much that she could not get together a coherent suicide plan for quite a while.

Lorraine’s psychiatrist was initially opposed to my seeing her, as her friend Teresa had been stigmatized with the "borderline personality disorder" diagnosis when in hospital, so was seen as a bad influence on her. But after Lorraine spent a couple of months in hospital calling herself Susie and acting consistently like a child, he was humble enough to acknowledge that perhaps he could learn some new things, and someone else’s help might be a good idea.”
― Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse

“Within the mental-health system in North America, the borderline victim of severe childhood trauma is usually blamed for her behaviour, which is regarded as having no legitimate basis and being self-indulgent; her trauma history is ignored and not talked about; and she is given as little treatment and follow-up as possible. At St Boniface Hospital in Winnipeg, many staff members expressed the opinion, in my presence, that borderlines and multiple personality disorder patients did not have a legitimate right to in-patient treatment, and the out-patient department would not accept patients with either diagnosis. (1995)”
― Colin A. Ross, Satanic Ritual Abuse: Principles of Treatment

“Adoption is a lifelong journey. It means different things to me at different times. Sometimes it is just a part of who I am. Other times it is something I am actively going through.”
― Kelly DiBenedetto, Adoption Is a Lifelong Journey

“The difficulties in diagnosing DID result primarily from lack of education among clinicians about dissociation, dissociative disorders, and the effects of psychological trauma, as well as from clinician bias. This leads to limited clinical suspicion about dissociative disorders and misconceptions about their clinical presentation. Most clinicians have been taught (or assume) that DID is a rare disorder with a florid, dramatic presentation. Although DID is a relatively common disorder, R. P. Kluft (2009) observed that “only 6% make their DID obvious on an ongoing basis” (p. 600).
- Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision, p4-5”
― James A. Chu

“I am the catalyst of change!”
― Kierra C.T. Banks

“There needs to be a nationwide awareness programme for all NHS staff, to educate them about dissociative disorders. Diagnoses need to be more obtainable within the NHS; people's lives should be placed ahead of funding restraints and bureaucratic red tape. We need minimum standards of care and treatment agreed and implemented within the NHS to end the current nightmare of the postcode lottery—not just guidelines that can be ignored but actual regulations.”
― carol broad , Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices

“Basic misunderstandings about DID encountered in the therapeuric community include the following;

• The expectation that all clients with DID will present in a Sybil-like manner, with obvious switching and extreme changes in personality.

• That therapists create DID in their clients.

• That DID clients have very little control over their internal systems and can be expected to stay in the mental health systein indefinitely.

• That alter personalities, especially child alters, are simply regressive states associated with anxiety or that switching represents a psychotic episode.”
― Deborah Bray Haddock

“Psychoanalysis has suffered the accusation of being “unscientific” from its very beginnings (Schwartz, 1999). In recent years, the Berkeley literary critic Frederick Crews has renewed the assault on the talking cure in verbose, unreadable articles in the New York Review of Books (Crews, 1990), inevitably concluding, because nothing else really persuades, that psychoanalysis fails because it is unscientific. The chorus was joined by philosopher of science, Adolf Grunbaum (1985), who played both ends against the middle: to the philosophers he professed specialist knowledge of psychoanalysis; to the psychoanalysts he professed specialist knowledge of science, particularly physics. Neither was true (Schwartz, 1995a,b, 1996a,b, 2000).
The problem that mental health clinicians always face is that we deal with human subjectivity in a culture that is deeply invested in denying the importance of human subjectivity. Freud’s great invention of the analytic hour allows us to explore, with our clients, their inner worlds. Can such a subjective instrument be trusted? Not by very many. It is so dangerously close to women’s intuition. Socalled objectivity is the name of the game in our culture. Nevertheless, 100 years of clinical practice have shown psychoanalysis and psychotherapy not only to be effective, but to yield real understandings of the dynamics of human relationships, particularly the reality of transference–countertransference re-enactments now reformulated by our neuroscientists as right brain to right brain communication (Schore, 1999).”
― Joseph Schwartz, Ritual Abuse and Mind Control

“Living with multiple personalities is not something you just wake up fully understanding. For months, maybe years after I first accepted the diagnosis, I was still discovering new nuances, fresh areas I hadn't considered.”
― Kim Noble, All of Me

“Some psychiatric clinicians appear to be so biologically or behaviorally oriented that they do not believe in the unconscious. Others have been so indoctrinated in the Freudian psychoanalytic model that they believe all accounts of incest are fantasy. A few of the older clinicians allow pride to get in their way and refuse to believe that they may have missed the diagnosis [of Dissociative Identity Disorder] in some of their patients.”
― Philip M. Coons

“OCD is like a storm that rages within, but with courage and perseverance, we can learn to dance in the rain.”
― Dr. Rameez Shaikh

“Jesus is not at war with mental health professionals. You can walk hand in hand with both Jesus and a therapist. In fact, you are doing the bravest thing of all by allowing someone in who can walk you through the hard things. We were never meant to go on this journey alone.”
― Tabitha Yates, Jesus and Therapy: Bridging the Gap Between Faith and Mental Health

“With a single breath you can change your brain and transform your approach to everyday life.”
― Randy Kamen, Behind the Therapy Door: Simple Strategies to Transform Your Life

“Those with dissociative disorders face a big enough battle living as multiples and dealing with past trauma. Like everyone else, they deserve to be heard and recognised, not stigmatised.”
― Carol Broad, Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices

“A few days later, I waited outside Dr. Brandenberg's door and realized that I was tired of excusing the medical community for "not knowing anything about multiples." MPD had been recognized as a disorder for at least a hundred years. It had been brought to the attention of the professional and public communities through Three Faces of Eve in the 1950s and again by Sybil in the 1970s. Literature related to the disorder had snowballed in the clinical journals.

I could understand that not every mental-health professional had treated a case, but I couldn't accept that mental-health professionals knew so little about it. At the very least, the doctors had access to the journals that had provided Jo with her wealth of information on the topic.”
― Joan Frances Casey, The Flock: The Autobiography of a Multiple Personality

“A wide variety of dissociative disorders including DID occur in the psychiatric population and may be misdiagnosed or underdiagnosed for a variety of reasons. Some psychiatrists believe these disorders are extremely rare and some believe that they do not exist. More research is needed, but these disorders may be more common than previously thought.”
― Julie P. Gentile

“However, it is important to remember that only 15 years ago most major training schools did not accept the existence of child abuse and condemned what they saw as the unhealthy excitement that was considered to emanate from the earliest exponents. The language of their criticism is very similar... to what greets the clinician of today who speaks of DID. It has been a later knowledge that understands the way the shame and trauma of abuse become projected into the professional network leading to splitting and blame.”
― Valerie Sinason, Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder

“Perhaps DID raises problematic philosophical and psychological concerns about the nature of the mind itself... Ideas of a unitary ego would incline professionals to see multiplicity as a behavioural disturbance. However, if the mind is seen as a seamless collaboration between multiple selves - a kind of trade union agreement for co-existence - it is less threatening to face this subject.”
― Valerie Sinason, Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder

“Though it may be a constant battle, let us not forget the strength and resilience it takes to face our fears and overcome the obstacles that OCD presents. Every step forward, no matter how small, is a triumph worth celebrating.”
― Dr. Rameez Shaikh

“With depression, there is always a plus one." ~Qurious Theologian”
― Tashara S. Void

“Despicable- an individual, be they a friend, family member, associate, acquaintance, an ex who works particularly in health care who would use someone's mental illness against them knowingly, deliberately and intentionally triggering them to cause and bring harm upon them. What else could we call this type of person.”
― Niedria Kenny, Order in the Courtroom: The Tale of a Texas Poker Player

“Mental health professionals have their own blocks, distraction, prejudices, and cultural upbringing, all of which color the work that they do, no matter how well-trained or how much work they have done on themselves.”
― Laurie E. Smith

“Let’s bring the "men" back into mental health —because, let’s face it, toughing it out in silence isn’t the flex it’s cracked up to be. Real strength isn’t about bottling it up; it’s about opening up. Mental health isn’t just for one gender—it’s for everyone. It’s time to ditch the macho act & normalize men talking about their feelings, because emotional wellness isn’t a sign of weakness—it’s a power move. Let’s get real, guys: taking care of your mind is as important as hitting the gym!”
― Life is Positive