The cruelty intrinsic to the workhouse system was excused by the need to discourage idleness, much as the malice intrinsic to the mental hospital system has been excused by the need to provide treatment.

You have to figure that there is something seriously wrong with somebody who wants to enter a profession that deals with whether people are screwing enough. Dealing with spirits, spooks, and demons almost seemed normal.

Theirs was the eternal youth of an alternating self, a youth with the constant although unfulfilled promise of growing up

_all that goes under the name of science is not necessarily scientific, and that all that goes under the name of health-care will not necessarily care for your health.

Calling it lunacy makes it easier to explain away the things we don't understand.

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 __reated_ and __ured_ by any means possible__ften with drugs that may be doing much more harm than good. This biological reductiveness, along with the stigma that it attracts, shapes the person__ 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.