Daily Inspiration Quote by Kate Millett

A “hopeless” diagnosis isn’t just information in Kate Millett’s telling; it’s a weapon. The question she asks is rhetorical, but it lands like a dare: if you collapse after being branded incurable, are you weak - or reacting sanely to an insane script? Millett frames psychiatry less as care than as a ceremony of defeat, where the institution delivers not only a label but a social sentence. “That diagnosis does you in” makes causality explicit: the system creates the very despair it then cites as evidence.

Her real target is humiliation - not as a side effect, but as a mechanism. “Being there” gestures toward confinement and coercion without needing clinical detail; the place itself becomes an argument, a scene of stripped agency. “Indignity” is the key word: mental illness is portrayed as something that can be managed, but the patient is treated as someone to be managed. The line “My God” is not poetic decoration; it’s the involuntary spike of emotion that punctures the sanitized language of treatment. It’s also a refusal to speak in the institution’s terms.

Context matters: Millett was a feminist activist who publicly criticized psychiatric power after her own experiences with hospitalization, at a time when women’s anger, sexuality, and nonconformity were routinely medicalized. The subtext is political: “hopeless” isn’t merely prognosis, it’s social control. If you can be defined as incurable, you can be safely discounted. Millett’s intent is to expose that bargain - and to insist that the crushing reaction is evidence of harm, not pathology.