Gary Greenberg > Quotes

“Give a name to suffering, perhaps the most immediate reminder of our insignificance and powerlessness, and suddenly it bears the trace of the human. It becomes part of our story. It is redeemed.”
― Gary Greenberg, The Book of Woe: the DSM and the unmaking of psychiatry

“community is a response to the prolonged emergency of being alive.”
― Gary Greenberg, Scotland

“L'enfer, c'est les autres, it would say, en particulier les voisins.”
― Gary Greenberg, Scotland

“But psychiatry’s appeal is not just about the possibility of cure, which is why the profession continues to flourish even when it cures nothing and relieves symptoms only haphazardly. It’s in the naming itself. What Wallace Stevens called the “blessed rage to order.”
― Gary Greenberg, The Book of Woe: the DSM and the unmaking of psychiatry

“The diagnostic enterprise hinges on an optimistic notion: that disease is part of a natural world that only awaits our understanding. But even if this is true, nature gives up its secrets grudgingly, and our finite senses are in some ways ill suited to extracting them. More important, our prejudices lead us to tear nature where we want it to break. Science, especially modern medicine, is founded on this equally optimistic idea: that experts can purge their inquiry of prejudice and desire, and map the landscape of suffering along its natural boundaries.”
― Gary Greenberg, The Book of Woe: the DSM and the unmaking of psychiatry

“Kipling was right: a skin that you can't shed can be itchy and uncomfortable,”
― Gary Greenberg, Scotland

“I thought about how emergency had obliterated a natural enmity, and how community is a response to the prolonged emergency of being alive.”
― Gary Greenberg, Scotland

“I've never heard anyone despise the Klan the way they despise Dan Rather or the ACLU or the people who came to protest.”
― Gary Greenberg, Scotland