Only the emerging specialty of psychoanalysis seemed to understand that mental maladies are not fully analogous to physical disease. They resist classification, and might better be known by their symptoms and the individualized sufferings of patients than by assigned names.

There is, to be sure, sometimes only a small difference between being alert to possible danger and allowing oneself to become terrified to the point of paralysis by seeming or imagined portents.

Once the notion of depression had begun to dominate the diagnostic armamentarium, it became but a matter of time before patients with relatively mild disorders of mood or anxiety would be entered into it.

Sherwin B. Nuland Quotes