Ron Powers > Quotes

“To begin consciously searching into the world of mental illness is to see it snap into focus before your eyes. It is everywhere. It has been hiding in plain sight, awaiting notice. Its camouflage is little more than the human instinct to reject engagement with the pitiable, the fearsome, the unspeakable—and to close our eyes to the moral obligations that those states of being demand of us.”
― Ron Powers, No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America

“Mark Twain was virtually alone among journalists in his reportage of Jewish Europeans as caught in the pincers of rising nationalist antagonisms.”
― Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life

“...I have sometimes imagined my own sanity as resting on the surface of a membrane, a thin and fragile membrane that can easily be ripped open, plunging me into the abyss of madness, where I join the tumbling souls whose membranes have likewise been pieced over the ages. Sometimes, when my thoughts are especially fevered, I can visualize the agent of this piercing. It is a watchful presence at the edge of things, silent and dripping, a stranger in a raincoat... When we fall into such psychosis, there are no other membranes below to catch and protect us. And the horror and helplessness of the fall are intensified by an uncaring world.”
― Ron Powers, No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America

“Taxpayers and legislators alike seem generally ignorant of the extent to which they are being soaked by the hidden costs of this parsimony. For instance, public care costs far less than public jails. The National Alliance on Mental Illness has estimated that for every $ 2,000 to $ 3,000 per year spent on treating the mentally ill, $ 50,000 is saved on incarceration costs.”
― Ron Powers, No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America

“The future will be decided in a thousand American urban neighborhoods and suburban conference centers and small-town church basements and library meeting rooms and rural kitchens... The future of mental health reform will depend upon whether enough people gather in enough of such venues as these to contemplate work of Dorothea Dix by joining to reject and extinguish our modern Bedlams, and replace these Bedlams with a reborn and more sophisticated and more enduring program of moral care. It will depend upon whether enough people will take notice of and be inspired by the rediscovery made by sociologists and psychiatrists: that kindness, companionship, and intimate care are demonstrable counterforces to deepening psychosis. Not cures, but counterforces, particularly when practiced in concert with psychotropic regimens that fit the specific nature of a person's affliction as well as that person's specific biosystem.”
― Ron Powers, No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America

“and by staff doctors, at least one of which resulted in a pregnancy. Earlier in the chain—on March 27—Walker, wary of the effect the scandal might have on his campaign, had written, “We need to continue to keep me out of the story as this is a process issue and not a policy matter.”1 Walker’s staff labored through the spring and summer to satisfy his wish. On September 2, Rindfleisch wrote, “Last week was a nightmare. A bad story every day on our looney bin. Doctors having sex with patients, patients getting knocked up. This has been coming for months and I’ve unofficially been dealing with it. So, it’s been crazy (pun intended).” Later, in an attempt to reassure a colleague on Walker’s staff, Rindfleisch somehow found it in herself to write: “No one cares about crazy people.”2 I began to rethink my determination not to write this book. I realized that my ten years of silence on the subject, silence that I had justified as insulation against an exercise in self-indulgence, was itself an exercise in self-indulgence. The”
― Ron Powers, No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America

“The prefrontal cortex is a complex, fragile region of the brain. In its healthy state, it directs human impulses toward rational choices and away from destructive or self destructive behavior. It allows us to deal with the present moment while storing plans for the future. Yet as the newest part of the brain to develop in human evolution, the prefrontal cortex is also the region that takes the longest time to reach maturity, or maximum operating efficiency. It will not be fully functional until the person is past the age of twenty. This out of sync progress ranks among the most profound natural misfortunes of humanity. For while the prefrontal cortex is taking its time, other powerful components of the humaninprogress have raced across the finish line and function without the cortex's restraints. A young adult with a still developing prefrontal cortex will have reached .physical maturity, which of course means the capacity to reproduce and the strong hormonal drive to do so.”
― Ron Powers, No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America

“The president who spurred Congress into action on mental health was Harry Truman. On November 19, 1945, before a joint session of Congress, Truman declared: There is… special need for research on mental diseases. We have done pitifully little about mental illnesses… There are at least two million persons in the United States who are mentally ill, and as many as ten million will probably need hospitalization for mental illness in the course of their lifetime. Mental cases occupy more than one-half of the hospital beds, at a cost of about 500 million dollars per year—practically all of it coming out of taxpayers’ money.”
― Ron Powers, No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America

“The prefrontal cortex is a complex, fragile region of the brain. In its healthy state, it directs human impulses toward rational choices and away from destructive or self destructive behavior. It allows us to deal with the present moment while storing plans for the future. Yet as the newest part of the brain to develop in human evolution, the prefrontal cortex is also the region that takes the longest time to reach maturity, or maximum operating efficiency. It will not be fully functional until the person is past the age of twenty.”
― Ron Powers, No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America

“These genetic malfunctions are unlikely to produce schizophrenia in an individual unless they are stimulated by environmental conditions. By far the most causative environmental factor is stress, especially during gestation in the womb, early childhood, and adolescence—stages in which the brain is continually reshaping itself, and thus vulnerable to disruption. Stress can take the form of a person's enduring sustained anger, fear, or anxiety, or a combination of these. Stress works its damage by prompting an oversupply of cortisol, the normally life sustaining “stress hormone” that converts high energy glycogen to glucose in liver and in muscle tissue. Yet when it is called upon to contain a rush of glycogen, cortisol can transform itself into “Public Enemy Number One,” as one health advocate put it. The steroid hormone swells to flood levels and triggers weight gain, high blood pressure, heart disease, damage to the immune system, and an overflow of cholesterol. Stress is likely a trigger for schizophrenia.”
― Ron Powers, No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America

“The Senate is now composed of a different material from what it once was. Its glory hath departed. Its halls no longer echo the words of a Clay, or Webster, or Calhoun . . . the void is felt.”
― Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life

“Thomas Insel, the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, has estimated that mental illness costs taxpayers $444 billion a year. Two-thirds of that total is eaten up by disability payments and lost productivity. Only a third is spent on medical care. “The way we pay for mental health today is the most expensive way possible,” Insel has said. “We don’t provide support early, so we end up paying for lifelong support.”
― Ron Powers, No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America

“He would rather decline 2 drinks than one German verb.”18”
― Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life

“Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take to the pen and pour them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside: then all that ink and labor are wasted, because I can’t print the result.”
― Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life

“Sam had laced nearly everything in the paper with his screwball wit—proposing in one news item that a newly enacted whiskey tax made it a patriotic duty to drink.)”
― Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life

“But now—why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater.”
― Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life

“He understood shock value: he frequently promised to demonstrate what he meant by “cannibalism” by eating a baby onstage, if someone would hand him one. No one ever did.”
― Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life

“The mentally ill people in our lives, as they strive to build healthy, well-supported, and rewarding lives for themselves, can show us all how to reconnect with the most primal of human urges, the urge to be of use, disentangling from social striving, consumer obsession, cynicism, boredom, and isolation, and honoring it among the true sources of human happiness.”
― Ron Powers, No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America

“Mr. Churchill by his father is an Englishman; by his mother he is an American; no doubt a blend that makes the perfect man. England and America: yes, we are kin. And now that we are also kin in sin, there is nothing more to be desired. The harmony is complete, the blend is perfect—like Mr. Churchill himself, whom I now have the honor to present to you.17”
― Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life

“The Chicago Tribune, noting that his entourage was among the last to disembark, quoted him as assuring some friends, “No, I didn’t get off on the other side of the boat.”1”
― Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life

“I am an anti-imperialist,” Mark Twain told the reporters at dockside. “I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”
― Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life

“Truman seethed. “I put it to you,” he railed during a campaign stop in Indianapolis during his famous come-from-behind reelection campaign in 1948. “Is it un-American to visit the sick, aid the afflicted or comfort the dying? I thought that was simple Christianity!”
― Ron Powers, No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America

“The “captain” says that when I came to engage passage in the Quaker City I “seemed to be full of whiskey, or something,” and filled his office with the “fumes of bad whiskey” . . . [F]or a ceaseless, tireless, forty-year public advocate of total abstinence the “captain” is a mighty good judge of whiskey at second-hand.28”
― Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life

“am quite sure that (bar one)II I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.”
― Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life

“The beautiful and “talented” proceeded from classic Anglo-Saxon stock, tribes of blond, blue-eyed Angles and Saxons and Jutes who immigrated to the British Isles from northern Europe in the fifth century in search of open farmland and whose descendants now went to the same churches, universities, and clubs that Galton frequented. The others, those inconvenient wogs, amounted to a deadly snake coiled in the garden of his Eden.”
― Ron Powers, No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America

“Here was a demonstration of what Howells maintained—at just about this time—was his most liberating literary strength, his “single-minded use of words, which he employs as Grant did to express the plain, straight meaning their common acceptance has given them . . . He writes English as if it were a primitive and not a derivative language, without Gothic or Latin or Greek behind it.”13”
― Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life

“Well, say, this beats croquet. There’s more go about it!”
― Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life

“At the ten-minute halftime, “with the figures standing 11 for Yale and 5 for Princeton, Mr. Clemens was one of the most eager of the mathematicians figuring how Princeton might yet pull the game out of the fire.” Princeton didn’t, but the reporter recorded the author’s color commentary on the first pigskin game he’d ever seen. “I should think they’d break every bone they ever had!”
― Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life

“am an anti-imperialist,” Mark Twain told the reporters at dockside. “I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”12”
― Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life

“But as long as American civilisation lasts New York will last.”99”
― Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life