Susan Sheehan > Quotes

“When you know all of those things exist for other people but not for you, sometimes it’s very hard to endure the not having.”
― Susan Sheehan, Is There No Place on Earth for Me?

“Mrs. Plotnick had learned from observing many patients over the years that the majority of patients felt well for the first month after they stopped taking their medication: The medication’s unpleasant side effects ceased, and their psychotic symptoms didn’t reappear, because there was a considerable amount of medication left in their systems. As a result, many patients thought they hadn’t needed the medication in the first place. During the second month off medication, many patients began to decompensate. By the third month, many were psychotic.”
― Susan Sheehan, Is There No Place on Earth for Me?

“You know, it was fun believing some of those things I believed, and in a way I hate to give up those beliefs. I’ll miss having those fantasies. There’s a charm to being sick. I like to be in the twilight zone of the real world.”
― Susan Sheehan, Is There No Place on Earth for Me?

“My skin is just like the lawn. I'm going to tear it off and pluck out the bed of dandelions. This isn't schizophrenia, it's terminal acne.”
― Susan Sheehan

“Miss Frumkin rummaged through her bag looking for a spoon. She seemed to be aware that there was no spoon in the bag, but she insisted on rummaging anyway. Finding no spoon, she took out her toothbrush and began to eat the yogurt with the toothbrush. Miss O’Reilly laughed at her. Miss Frumkin didn’t seem to mind. “They laughed at Bell and they laughed at Edison,” she said, throwing the toothbrush into the wastebasket. She finished eating the yogurt with her fingers.”
― Susan Sheehan, Is There No Place on Earth for Me?

“I have schizophrenia--cancer of the nerves. My body is overcrowded with nerves.”
― Susan Sheehan, Is There No Place on Earth for Me?

“The body is run by electricity. My wiring is all faulty.”
― Susan Sheehan, Is There No Place on Earth for Me?

“She spent the night there, engaging in behavior of a particularly primitive kind, and had to be showered the next morning.”
― Susan Sheehan, Is There No Place on Earth for Me?

“I have schizophrenia — cancer of the nerves. My body is overcrowded with nerves. This is going to win me the Nobel Prize for medicine.”
― Susan Sheehan, Is There No Place on Earth for Me?

“Wherever I go, I take myself with me, and that always spoils it.”
― Susan Sheehan, Is There No Place on Earth for Me?

“State and federal legislation — particularly the Community Mental Health Centers Act, passed by Congress in 1963 — called for the funding of community mental-health centers, to reduce the role of the discredited state hospitals in the care of the mentally ill, but community facilities were built slowly when they were built at all.”
― Susan Sheehan, Is There No Place on Earth for Me?

“she was counting the brushstrokes when she brushed her teeth — on the rare days that she did brush her teeth.”
― Susan Sheehan, Is There No Place on Earth for Me?

“As he spoke, Miss Frumkin looked at her chart, which was directly in front of Dr. Sun, facing him. Reading upside down is one of Miss Frumkin’s talents. It has enabled her, over the years, to read many things not intended for her eyes.”
― Susan Sheehan, Is There No Place on Earth for Me?

“For a long time, I wanted to go on 'What's My Line?' as a mental patient. Being a mental patient really is my profession . . . But the show has gone off the air, and I may not be mentally ill anymore. Maybe I just have idiosyncrasies - you'd have to ask a doctor.”
― Susan Sheehan, Is There No Place on Earth for Me?

“In seeking to carry out its fresh policy in the mid-sixties, the department had to acknowledge that its large, centralized hospitals were better suited to what they had been doing in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century—storing damaged human beings—than they were to the reverse goal of treating and releasing salvageable human beings.”
― Susan Sheehan, Is There No Place on Earth for Me?