Mark Vonnegut
Mark Vonnegut
Mark Vonnegutis an American pediatrician and memoirist. He is the son of writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and his first wife, Jane Cox. He is the brother of Edith Vonnegut and Nanette Vonnegut. He described himself in the preface to his 1975 book as "a hippie, son of a counterculture hero, BA in religion,genetic disposition to schizophrenia.":preface...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth11 May 1947
CountryUnited States of America
Mark Vonnegut quotes about
reading writing thinking
The most radical, audacious thing to think is that there might be some point to working hard and thinking hard and reading hard and writing hard and trying to be of service
running sleep thinking
I don't think the people today who start hearing voices, stop eating and sleeping, and run amuck are likely to get good treatment. Having more knowledge, better diagnostic capabilities, better medications with fewer side effects, can't make up for the fact that most patients are being treated by doctors, therapists, and hospitals, who are operating under constraints and incentives that reward non-treatment, non-hospitalization, non-therapy, non-follow-up, non-care. Lost to follow-up is the best outcome a health insurer can hope for.
art thinking giving
Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art, you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.
sick wells
None of us are entirely well, and none of us are irrecoverably sick.
reading writing reading-and-writing
Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts...
feelings important mental-illness
With mental illness the trick is to not take your feelings so seriously; you’re zooming in and zooming away from things that go from being too important to being not important at all.
reading writing way
Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.
cancer flu ulcers
Colds, ulcers, flu, and cancer are things we get. Schizophrenia is something we are.
mental-illness schizophrenia worst
As well as being one of the worst things that can happen to a human being, schizophrenia can also be one of the richest learning and humanizing experiences life offers.
polite
My only hope was to be polite.
mean voice differences
When I talk to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and other patient support groups, I take questions at the end. At one talk I was asked, "What's the difference between yourself and someone without mental illness?". At another talk I was asked, "How do you make the voices be not so mean?". I wish I knew.
suicide feel-better gun
I saw a study the other day showing that some atypical anti-psychotic was at least as good as mood stabilizers in preventing suicide. It's a very good thing to decrease suicide but we should care at least a little if I'm not killing myself because I feel better or if I just can't remember where I put the damn gun.
crazy people forgiving
And if you're lucky enough to survive going crazy and get back to the point where you can pass for normal, it builds a question into the rest of your life. You have to forgive people for wondering, 'How all right can he be?'
children making-love grace
The way I played music there was the way I wanted to farm, chop wood, cook, make love, raise children. Everything. A lo of it had to do with things I felt while I played. If only I could feel that sense of total absorption in what I was doing when I was doing other things. It was more than absorption, it was spontaneity, competence, a sense of grace and playfulness, of being in touch with an inexhaustible source of energy and beauty.