Top 50 Drew Pinsky Quotes

I always hate taking categorical positions.

Addiction is not a curable condition.

I’ve had people that I’ve given up on, kicked out – situations where I was becoming part of the problem because I was sort of enabling so I said, ‘Godspeed, farewell.’ And they’ve come back to me four years later and they’re in a CDAAC program or they’re getting a PhD.

Crying is scary to men! To us, it’s a sign that something completely earth-shattering is happening.

Ages 18 to 22 is such a hard transition, everyone‘s depressed.

Many aspects of the George Zimmerman trial have deeply affected me.

What motivates most people to change their behavior is consequences. No consequences? No behavior modification.

In the late 90s I was hired to participate in a 2 year initiative discussing intimacy and depression which was funded by an educational grant by Glaxo Wellcome.

I tell women to stop learning how to keep a man and make him happy, and to try figuring out what they want from a relationship, to trust their own instincts and not worry about pleasing someone else.

You should hear all the people talking to me about Heath Ledger, and yet I’m the only person shooting his mouth off out there about what everyone actually already knows.

I was doing general medicine and during residency, I moonlighted at a psychiatric hospital and became very interested in the medical care of psychiatric patients.

All I treat at the hospital is trauma survivors.

I have a pretty keen ethical compass.

Humans need intimacy. We’ve destroyed it in our country.

When you get your viral load down to zero, you reduce the risk of transmission of HIV by 90 percent.

I do not know Rep. Weiner. But I do know he seems to have the features of a narcissist. Narcissists feel empty. Narcissists feel invincible. But their emotional landscape is barren.

Millennials really don’t perceive hierarchies. They either don’t perceive them or don’t like them.

The history of the office of First Lady had not been kind to those with mental health issues.

Families that have addicted members learn to operate with secrecy.

We have a pandemic of childhood trauma.

Just like everybody else, celebrities have brains and those brains get conditions – addiction, depression.

We are trying to learn from the consequences of one’s peers‘ actions.

Medicine saved my life, quite literally. I woke up every day of my training thinking, ‘I love doing this,’ feeling like it was so important what I was doing.

Trauma survivors have a deficiency in their capacity to regulate emotions – they’re too prolonged and too intense and too negative. As a corollary to affect regulation, self-esteem, sense of self and inter-personal functioning all goes downhill. And that’s a chronic thing that’s solved in an-inter personal context.

When I run on the treadmill, I read. But I have found that the only way to read while on the treadmill is to hold the book, since it moves around too much on the stand, you move around too much. I’ve gotten very good at holding a book and running, which tends to screw up my neck a little bit.

Women are upset if their partner has an intimate conversation of any kind with someone who isn’t them. They consider it a violation, a betrayal. Men should think this way, but they don’t.

Remember, you’re not always the professional.

Trauma super charges addiction and makes it really bad. It doesn’t necessarily cause it, though it can trigger it. It’s not necessarily the issue but if you have bad addiction, it’s there.

In love addiction that experience of: ‘Oh my God, I’m in love… I feel whole, and I feel like I’ve known this person forever.’ That is a feeling that you have to have all the time. You become addicted to it.

I have no agenda.

Symptoms that may seem psychiatric or psychological can actually be signs of a medical condition.

Students have tons of health and intimacy and relationship questions, and no one’s listening to them.

You don’t have to have a physical relationship with someone other than your spouse or significant other to betray him or her.

The way people get hooked on fame… it can behave very much like an addiction.

The people and places that cause terror in childhood cause attraction in adulthood. We end up being repetitively attracted to the same kind of person that obliges us by acting out the same behavior over again.

When I started out, no one would talk to young people about HIV or AIDS. I looked around and radio looked like a powerful way to shape culture in a healthy way.

Nothing demonstrates a celebrity‘s basic drive for attention more powerfully than a willingness to check one’s dignity at the door, week after week, in front of millions of viewers.

The road to sobriety is not easy and rehabilitation and the recovery process are not to be taken lightly.

An Internet ‘relationship’ doesn’t have to be catastrophically harmful to be inappropriate. Hurtful is bad enough.

I’m a workaholic.

Narcissism is not about self love. It’s a clinical trait that belies a deep sense of emptiness, low self-esteem, emotional detachment, self-loathing, extreme problems with intimacy.

People have sort of been swirling around me, going, ‘Oh, you should run for mayor.’ Well I didn’t really want that job. ‘Well, you should run for governor.’ Well, that’s not really possible.

I’m too busy to block everyone on Twitter.

People now know of the word intervention and think they understand what it means, but more often than not they go about intervening the wrong way. I see people staging things on their own. But discussing the nature of somebody‘s condition over breakfast isn’t an intervention.

Brains affect brains through far more means than words and listening.

Treatment of alcohol addiction can take many forms.

We can all make better decisions when we’re informed.

Narcissism is the result of longstanding behavioral patterns that reflect fixed brain functioning. It requires a lot of motivation to change these patterns.

We want to blame people who have brain disorders – they should somehow be able to magically rise above it. It’s a profound misconception.

In medicine you go from dying to chronically ill. You don’t go from dying to better than you ever knew you could be. That just doesn’t happen.