"Very shortly, you will be going onto your assigned wards. Within those wards, you will see over fifty of the sickest, craziest, most bizarre people you will ever encounter. They will be hallucinating, gesticulating, and delusional in the most grotesque ways. Every cell in your body will rebel and want to block out the experience. But here is the thing you must remember. Every one of those symptoms, as strange as they may seem to you, makes perfect sense to those people. Every single one, has been evolved and carefully crafted, to try to deal with some impossible family situation. Every symptom represents an attempt by that person to adapt to the hand that fate has dealt him. You are to regard each one as an artistic, creative endeavor to survive. Your job, and your only job, is to appreciate, and admire that effort!"
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Finding a Place to Stand, p. vi (E. R. Shapiro; 2020)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Elvin_Semrad
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Elvin Semrad
1909 – 1976
Elvin Semrad (1909-1976) was an American psychoanalytic psychiatrist.
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