Thomas Insel > Quotes

“But the larger point is that people with mental illness are missing out on a century of medical progress that has extended life expectancy for Americans from fifty-five to nearly eighty years. In other words, in terms of life expectancy, these Americans are living in the early 1920s.”
― Thomas Insel, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“Ubuntu is a South African word that means roughly “I am, because of you.” The concept of ubuntu captures both a personal meaning of connection, manifested by warmth and generosity, and a political meaning, represented by inclusion and equity. President Obama spoke to both meanings at the 2013 memorial for Nelson Mandela. “There is a word in South Africa—ubuntu—a word that captures Mandela’s greatest gift: his recognition that we are all bound together in ways that are invisible to the eye; that there is a oneness to humanity; that we achieve ourselves by sharing ourselves with others, and caring for those around us.”
― Thomas Insel, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“For a psychiatrist who holds the keys to this “kingdom of the sick,” there is rarely comfort about committing a patient to care that they refuse. Yes, the near-term gain is clear, because treatments can control the symptoms and prevent a suicide. But the long-term gain is less clear. The gifted therapist Marsha Linehan, who was one of my advisors at NIMH, used to say that there is nothing worse that hospitalizing a suicidal patient. “When you commit a patient, you are saying they are hopeless. You are saying, ‘I can’t help you.’ A suicidal person does not need a locked unit. He needs a reason to live.”
― Thomas Insel, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“But what gets lost in the discussion about discrimination and negative attitudes about treatment and even civil rights is the complicated experience of having a mental illness. Whereas cancer patients will fight to get care, people with psychosis will fight to resist it. This resistance is in part about the side effects of medications or the indignity of hospitalization, but also in many cases because the irrationality of psychosis confers a kind of cognitive blindness, complete with a paranoid certainty that everyone else is missing the truth.”
― Thomas Insel, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”
― Thomas Insel, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“A homeless woman who rejected care for two and a half years by screaming at the outreach team when they approached was finally committed for involuntary treatment when she became threatening. Three years later, O’Connell saw her at a board meeting of a nonprofit organization. Finding her totally transformed, O’Connell remarked, “You look fabulous.” Her response, “Screw you. You left me out there for all those years and didn’t help.”
― Thomas Insel, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“Not only are there nearly three times more suicides than homicides each year, but suicide as a cause of medical mortality surpasses breast cancer, prostate cancer, and AIDS. At least two thirds, some would say 90 percent, of suicides result from depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or one of the other categories of mental illness.”
― Thomas Insel, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“Mental illnesses are, in fact, major killers, not by homicide but by suicide. There are over 47,000 suicide deaths in the U.S. each year, the equivalent of a mass shooting of 129 people each day, every day. That is a suicide every 11 minutes.”
― Thomas Insel, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“homeless woman who rejected care for two and a half years by screaming at the outreach team when they approached was finally committed for involuntary treatment when she became threatening. Three years later, O’Connell saw her at a board meeting of a nonprofit organization. Finding her totally transformed, O’Connell remarked, “You look fabulous.” Her response, “Screw you. You left me out there for all those years and didn’t help.”
― Thomas Insel, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“The heritability of bipolar disorder or schizophrenia surpassed the heritability of cancer, diabetes, and hypertension. In identical twins who share all their DNA, the concordance of schizophrenia is 50 percent, fifty times higher than the general population and ten times higher than nonidentical twins. How could genomics fail to identify individual risk or subtypes? Surely DNA sequences could help us cut nature at the joints.”
― Thomas Insel, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health