Samantha

“One of the consequenses of surviving schizophrenia for fifty years is that sooner or later, the cure becomes as damaging as the disease”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“The metaphor I use is that years ago, clinicians used to look at ‘fever’ as one disease,” said John McGrath, an epidemiologist with Australia’s Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research and one of the world’s authorities on quantifying populations of mentally ill people. “Then they split it into different types of fevers. And then they realized it’s just a nonspecific reaction to various illnesses. Psychosis is just what the brain does when it’s not working very well.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“That story is about children, now grown, investigating the mysteries of their own childhood—reconstituting the fragments of their parents’ dream, and shaping it into something new. It is about rediscovering the humanity in their own brothers, people who most of the world had decided were all but worthless. It is about, even after the worst has happened in virtually every imaginable way, finding a new way to understand what it means to be a family.”
― Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

“If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.”
― Gwen Adshead, The Devil You Know: Encounters in Forensic Psychiatry