"In the medical model, you take a person
with a mental illness, you provide treatment
in the hopes of reducing symptoms, and then
they're supposed to approximate some notion
of normality. Our research shows the
opposite. You take a person with a
mental illness, you then reduce the
discrimination and stigma against them,
increase their social roles and
participation, which provides them a reason
to get better in the first place, and then
you provide treatment and support. The issue
is not so much making them normal but
helping them get their lives back."
- Larry Davidson, a
professor at Yale University
"...madness, provided it comes as the gift
of heaven, is the channel by which we
received the greatest blessing. ...the
men of old who gave things their names saw
no disgrace or reproach in madness;
otherwise they would not have connected with
it the name of the noblest of all arts, the
art of discerning the future, and called it
the manic art... So, according to the evidence provided by our
ancestors, madness is a nobler thing than
sober sense... madness comes from God,
where as sober sense is merely human."
- Socrates
-
Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII
by Plato, translated by Walter Hamilton
"My brain is your business"
- Deborah Gibson
"When our failings generate
fear, we then have soul-sickness. This
sickness, in turn, generates still more
character defects. Unreasonable fear
that our instincts will not be satisfied
drives us to covet the possessions of
others, to lust for sex and power, to
become angry when our instinctive
demands are threatened, to be envious
when the ambitions of others seem to be
realized while ours are not. We eat,
drink, and grab for more of everything
than we need, fearing we shall never
have enough. And, with genuine alarm at
the prospect of work, we stay lazy. We
loaf and procrastinate, or at best work
grudgingly and under half steam. These
fears are the termites that ceaselessly
devour the foundations of whatever sort
of life we try to build. "
-Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, page
49
