Christmas Psychiatry

Sorry I’ve not written anything for ages, I’ve been revising for MRCPsych paper 3, which seems to be taking all my time.  I’ll be back in the New Year!

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Here are some mildly amusing psychiatry epigrams  shamelessly stolen from Therapist in a Box – a lightweight psychoanalytical stocking-filler.  Unpacking the context and tacit meanings of each of the below are posts in themselves – some other time perhaps.   That some of the below were said with serious intent is worthy of note.

‘A neurotic is man who builds a castle in the sky.  A psychotic is the man who lives in it.  A psychiatrist is the man who charges them both rent’ – Jerome Lawrence, playwright

‘If you talk to God, you are praying.  If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia’ – Thomas Szasz M.D. psychiatrist

‘The aim of psychoanalysis is to relieve people of their neurotic unhappiness so that they can be normally unhappy’ – Sigmund Freud

‘A Freudian slip is when you say one thing, but mean your mother’ – author unknown

‘Men will always be mad, and those that cure them are the maddest of them all’ – Voltaire

‘Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you’ – Carl Jung

‘The Statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of a mental illness.  Think of your three best friends.  If they are okay, then it’s you’ – Rita Mae Brown, American author and playwright

‘A psychiatrist asks a lot of expensive questions that your wife will ask for free’ – Joey Adams, American comedian author columist

‘There never was a genius without a tincture of madness’ – Aristotle

‘They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me’ – Nathaniel Lee, English dramatist (on being consigned to a mental institution circa c.17)

Season’s greetings! FP