David Kaiser > Quotes

“the earliest battles flared between himself and fellow physicist Leonard Susskind over whether quantum mechanics implied that information could leak out of black holes.”
― David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival

“But, as Uri Geller seemed to demonstrate, certain talented individuals might possess “volitional control” such that they could impose some order on the usually random quantum motions. Some”
― David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival

“It is quite depressing to listen to the discourse of modern psychiatry. In fact, it has become embarrassing to me. One gets the strong impression that patients have become abstractions black boxes of biologic symptoms, disconnected from the narratives of their current and past lives. This pseudo-scientific discourse is shot through with insecurity and pretension, creating the illusion of objectivity, an inevitable march of progress beyond the hopeless subjectivity of psychoanalysis. Psychotherapy is dismissed and relegated to nonmedical therapists.”
― David Kaiser, MD

“The epistomology-soaked orgy ought to come to an end! --Einstein”
― David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival

“Relief from symptoms is a part of treatment. Modern psychiatry would have us believe that this is all treatment should be. Meaning, desire, loss and death are no longer the province of the psychiatrist. In this process patients are reduced to something less than fully human, as they become an abstract collection of symptoms without meaning to be "managed" by technicians called psychiatrists.”
― David Kaiser, MD

“Mental illnesses are equated with symptoms. The surface is all there is. The perverse beauty of this scheme is that if you take away a patient's symptoms, the disorder is gone. For those who do serious work with patients, this manual is useless, because for me it is simply irrelevant what name you give to a particular set of symptoms. It is an absolute myth created by modern psychiatry that these "disorders" actually exist as discrete entities that have a cause and treatment. This is essentially a pseudo-scientific enterprise that grew out of modern psychiatry's desire to emulate modern medical science, despite the very real possibility that psychic pain, because of its existential nature, may always elude the capture of modern medical discourse and practice.”
― David Kaiser, MD

“To give a patient nothing but a diagnosis and a pill demonstrates arrogance, laziness and bad faith on the part of the psychiatrist. Any psychiatrist needs to be continually aware of the very real possibility that they are or can easily become agents of social control and coercion.”
― David Kaiser, MD

“Within the general field of modern psychiatry, biologism now completely dominates the discourse on the causes and treatment of mental illness, and in my view this has been a catastrophe with far-reaching effects on individual patients and the cultural psyche at large.”
― David Kaiser, MD

“What I am advocating is a psychiatry which
devotes itself humbly to the task of listening to patients in a way that other medical practitioners cannot. This means paying close attention to a patient's current and past narrative without attempting to control, manipulate or define it. From this position a psychiatrist can then assist the patient in raising relevant questions about their lives and pain”
― David Kaiser, MD

“What is left completely out, of course, are any notions that our psychic ills are a reflection of cultural pathology. In fact, this new biologic psychiatry can only exist to the extent it can deny not only the truths of psychoanalysis, but also the truths of any serious cultural criticism.”
― David Kaiser, MD

“Patients are suffering from far more than symptoms. Symptoms are the signs and clues to direct us to the real issues. If you take away the symptoms too quickly with medications or suggestion, you lose the opportunity to help a patient in a more profound way.”
― David Kaiser, MD

“the reality of treating patients, medications have profound limitations. I know that if the only tool I had in treatment was a prescription pad, I would be a poor psychiatrist. The center of treatment will always need to be listening to and speaking with the patients coming to me. This means listening seriously to what they say about their lives and
history as a whole, not merely listening for which symptoms might respond to medications. Although it seems astounding
that I would have to state this, biologic psychiatrists as a whole
really only listen to that portion of the patient's discourse that corresponds to their biologic paradigms of mental illness. It is the nature of dogma that its practitioners hear only what they
want to hear”
― David Kaiser, MD

“when a person becomes depressed, for example, they are
less able to read it or interpret it as a sign that there may be a
problem in their life that needs to be looked at or addressed. They are less able to question their life choices, or question for example the institutions that surround them. They are less able to fashion their own personal or cultural critique which could potentially lead them to more fruitful directions. Instead they identify themselves as ill and submit to the correction of a psychiatrist, who promises to take away the depression so they can get back to their lives as they are. In short, the very meanings of unhappiness are being redefined as illness. In my view this is a dismaying cultural catastrophe.”
― David Kaiser, MD

“The fact that drug companies embrace
and fund this new psychiatry is cause enough for alarm. Equally telling is a similar embrace by the managed care industry, which obviously likes its quick-fix approach and simplistic approach to complicated clinical problems.”
― David Kaiser, MD

“There will be no substitute for the difficult work of engaging with patients at the level of their lived experience, of helping patients piece together meaning and understanding in the place of their pain, fragmentation and confusion”
― David Kaiser, MD

“Patients these days are not suffering from "biologic illnesses."
What I generally see is patients suffering from current or past violence, traumatic loss, loss of power or control over their lives and the effects of cultural fragmentation, isolation and impoverishment that are specific to this culture at this time. How this manifests in any individual is absolutely specific; therefore, one should resist any attempt to generalize or classify, as science forces us to do. Once you go down the route of generalization, you have ceased listening to the patient and the richness of their lived experience”
― David Kaiser, MD