Mary Maddock

“Are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming?”
― Charles Dickens, Night Walks: And Other Essays

“A more fundamental problem with labelling human distress and deviance as mental disorder is that it reduces a complex, important, and distinct part of human life to nothing more than a biological illness or defect, not to be processed or understood, or in some cases even embraced, but to be ‘treated’ and ‘cured’ by any means possible—often with drugs that may be doing much more harm than good. This biological reductiveness, along with the stigma that it attracts, shapes the person’s interpretation and experience of his distress or deviance, and, ultimately, his relation to himself, to others, and to the world. Moreover, to call out every difference and deviance as mental disorder is also to circumscribe normality and define sanity, not as tranquillity or possibility, which are the products of the wisdom that is being denied, but as conformity, placidity, and a kind of mediocrity.”
― Neel Burton, The Meaning of Madness

“What’s more insane? Hearing imaginary voices? Or not hearing the real ones?”
― Forrest Carr, A Journal of the Crazy Year

“The more time, toil, and sacrifice spent by a population in producing medicine as a commodity, the larger will be the by-product, namely, the fallacy that society has a supply of health locked away which can be mined and marketed.”
― Ivan Illich, Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health