Best 923 quotes in «mental illness quotes» category

Sometimes, when you want to help a broken person, your attempts only remind them of their missing pieces.

Sometimes you have to get lost before you can find yourself.

So part of you wanted to be kissing him and another part of you felt the intense worry that comes with being intimate with someone." "Right, but I wasn't worried about intimacy. I was worried about microbial exchange." "Well, your worry expressed itself as being about microbial exchange." I just groaned at the therapy bullshit. She asked me if I'd taken my Ativan. I told her I hadn't brought it to Davis's house. And then she asked me if I was taking the Lexapro every day, and I was, like, not every day. The conversation devolved into her telling me that medication only works if you take it, and that I had to treat my health problem with consistency and care, and me trying to explain that there is something intensely weird and upsetting about the notion that you can only become yourself by ingesting a medication that changes your self.

Soon I find myself squatting on the floor. I am still striking my face; not with my fists this time, but with wide-open hands. I am slapping myself. The sounds I make when my palms meet my cheeks are like an unrelenting round of applause. I am clapping myself. Or clapping for myself. I start to giggle. All the voices are receding now. I am no longer filled with rage or disappointment. I clap and clap and simply cannot stop.

Soon my sobs dulled to a whimper. Soon my breathing came back. Soon I was able to get off the carpet. Soon I'd meet my friends for college and pretend it hadn't happened.

Spike Lee was the voice depicting the ills of social issues. Joseph Strickland will depict the spiritual issues (or ills) from within. ("The Making of Dual Mania: Filmmaking Chicago Style," 2018)

Spring and Fall” …cannot be said to be about depression - but of course, to someone who is depressed, everything is about depression. …For some of us, the sadness running under the skin of things begins as a trickle and ends up a hemorrhage, staining everything.

Split is doing well at the box office around the world, but it misrepresents people with dissociative identity disorder (DID; previously called multiple personality disorder). The trailer is particularly gripping, luring in audiences by depicting a man with DID kidnapping and preparing to torture three teenage girls. Kevin (played by James McAvoy) juggles 24 personalities that are based on stereotypes: a cutesy 9-year-old infatuated with Kanye West, a flamboyant designer, and the “Beast,” a superhuman monster who sees the girls as “sacred food.” Kevin falsely represents people with DID through exaggerated symptoms, extreme violence, and unrealistic physical characteristics. The senior author, an expert in DID, has not seen any DID patient who is this violent in 25 years of clinical practice. Kevin’s ghastly personalities are so over-the-top that terrifying scenes are making audiences laugh.

Starving artist: starving for affection, starving for attention

Statistics say that a range of mental disorders affects more than one in four Americans in any given year. That means millions of Americans are totally batshit. but having perused the various tests available that they use to determine whether you're manic depressive. OCD, schizo-affective, schizophrenic, or whatever, I'm surprised the number is that low. So I have gone through a bunch of the available tests, and I've taken questions from each of them, and assembled my own psychological evaluation screening which I thought I'd share with you. So, here are some of the things that they ask to determine if you're mentally disordered 1. In the last week, have you been feeling irritable? 2. In the last week, have you gained a little weight? 3. In the last week, have you felt like not talking to people? 4. Do you no longer get as much pleasure doing certain things as you used to? 5. In the last week, have you felt fatigued? 6. Do you think about sex a lot? If you don't say yes to any of these questions either you're lying, or you don't speak English, or you're illiterate, in which case, I have the distinct impression that I may have lost you a few chapters ago.

Successful writing is a slow, daily, meticulous form of mental illness.

Suddenly, I’m lighter, only half of who I was.

Suicide is a form of murder— premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes some getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind. It’s important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there’s a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there’s a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there’s a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance. The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark—why not kill myself? Missed the bus—better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie—maybe I shouldn’t kill myself. In reality, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.

Take a shower, wash off the day. Drink a glass of water. Make the room dark. Lie down and close your eyes. Notice the silence. Notice your heart. Still beating. Still fighting. You made it, after all. You made it, another day. And you can make it one more. You’re doing just fine.

Take it from me, that kind of torment causes you to retreat to a place in your mind where you are so strong that nothing and no one can bother you. Or so you think! What you don't realize is that each time an incident occurs, you retreat inside of yourself a little bit at a time, until one day you might not recognize who YOU are.

Telling a person who is depressed to have positive thoughts is the same as telling a sick person not to be sick. It doesn’t work.

Tapi, aku tak ingin menjadi dekat dengan siapa pun, atau bahkan menpercayainya. Brutus pun bisa membunuh Julius Caesar, bukan? Dan kali ini, aku tak mau menjadi orang yang mengatakan 'et tu Brute?

That is what madness is, isn't it? All the wheels fly off the bus and things don't make sense any more. Or rather, they do, but it's not a kind of sense anyone else can understand.

That nervousness that makes your palms sweat and your heart race before you get up and make a speech in front of an audience? That's what I feel in a normal conversation at the dinner table. Or just thinking about having a conversation at the dinner table.

The best part of having superpowers is that most of the time other people do not even know that you have them— like when Peter Parker goes paintballing, people just think he is a really awesome paintballer, and he totally gets away with using his Spidey senses, and when Aquaman is on OkCupid, and he says he spends a lot of time thinking about global warming, people just think he’s a conscientious dude, and on the days that I get out of bed and put on appropriate workplace attire and eat three meals, none of which are Hot Pockets, people can’t even tell that right then, at that moment, I am using my superpowers. Anxiety is your body’s response to perceived danger and mine is so strong you would have to call it a superpower. It never gives up; It is always looking for a fight; It is the fiercest part of me.

That’s what mountains do, they taunt you, lure you to the freedom of the wilderness, and it is fucking exhilarating.

That was the crux. You. Only you could work on you. Nobody could force you, and if you weren't ready, then you weren't ready, and no amount of open-armed encouragement was going to change that.

The 16 characteristics of psychopaths: 1. Intelligent 2. Rational 3. Calm 4. Unreliable 5. Insincere 6. Without shame or remorse 7. Having poor judgment 8. Without capacity for love 9. Unemotional 10. Poor insight 11. Indifferent to the trust or kindness of others 12. Overreactive to alcohol 13. Suicidal 14. Impersonal sex life 15. Lacking long-term goals 16. Inadequately motivated antisocial behavior

The Bad-Moon Girls appear on days when Dad doesn't know what he is thinking, or even if he is thinking. Those days can weigh less than air or more than an ocean. He has blank thoughts without feelings, followed by heavy feelings without thoughts. Time means nothing. A minute ticks by in the same rhythm as an entire day. He can look at one thing for an hour without moving. He can see me or Victor without knowing we are in the room, peering at us as if we are underwater, moving in warped slow motion. After the nothingness, he wades through a stagnant lake with the moon reflected in it, waiting for the daylight to rinse it away. He almost drowns while time ticks on. The sky is filled with black milk. No stars. Two days can pass before he surfaces. Dad's brain-switch, the focusing thing the rest of us switch on to make things look better, is a bit buggered. Those are his words, not mine. The Bad-Moon Girls whisper evil in Dad's ear, the sort of women who would set their own mother on fire if there were no other way to light their cigarettes. The trouble is, they can follow. Just as we were setting off to Clacton last autumn, they hunted him down.

The balding headstones of the others—quarantined from their own mothers & sisters & daughters— I wondered if they, like us, were strange alloys of sadness & forgetting the words to the songs.

The boundaries were destroyed; it was all in the open, the rotting animal of her soul, the tickling sickness in the tumultuous cacophony in her mother's vibrating skull that spoke only to itself in everlasting distortions.

The cage of your pain is wide open. It’s time to fly free.

The central mechanism of the avoidance mechanism of PTSD is the ego defense of denial

The child psychologist's clinic: where imaginary friends go to die, where dreams go to burn, where creativity goes to drown.

That “teaching myself social behaviors” thing, for example, was a window into my entire childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. There were things I needed to learn differently from most of the people around me, and the amount of useful, appropriate support I received back then was exactly zero. At the same time, the criticism I received felt infinite, especially when I tried to articulate my struggles. A person who I probably shouldn’t have been friends with once told me I needed to stop “thinking things through” in social situations and just “let my instincts take over.” In retrospect, I wish I’d replied, “What the hell are you talking about, ‘let my instincts take over’?” He might as well have said, “Just try really hard to grow a third arm between your shoulder blades and eventually it’ll happen!” Nothing about those situations felt instinctive; I had to learn how to navigate them in other ways

The anxiety of the sexual act is my sexual act: a love story.

the capture the rapture the rupture of a soul a solo symphony

The case of a patient with dissociative identity disorder follows: Cindy, a 24-year-old woman, was transferred to the psychiatry service to facilitate community placement. Over the years, she had received many different diagnoses, including schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, schizoaffective disorder, and bipolar disorder. Dissociative identity disorder was her current diagnosis. Cindy had been well until 3 years before admission, when she developed depression, "voices," multiple somatic complaints, periods of amnesia, and wrist cutting. Her family and friends considered her a pathological liar because she would do or say things that she would later deny. Chronic depression and recurrent suicidal behavior led to frequent hospitalizations. Cindy had trials of antipsychotics, antidepressants, mood stabilizers, and anxiolytics, all without benefit. Her condition continued to worsen. Cindy was a petite, neatly groomed woman who cooperated well with the treatment team. She reported having nine distinct alters that ranged in age from 2 to 48 years; two were masculine. Cindy’s main concern was her inability to control the switches among her alters, which made her feel out of control. She reported having been sexually abused by her father as a child and described visual hallucinations of him threatening her with a knife. We were unable to confirm the history of sexual abuse but thought it likely, based on what we knew of her chaotic early home life. Nursing staff observed several episodes in which Cindy switched to a troublesome alter. Her voice would change in inflection and tone, becoming childlike as ]oy, an 8-year-old alter, took control. Arrangements were made for individual psychotherapy and Cindy was discharged. At a follow-up 3 years later, Cindy still had many alters but was functioning better, had fewer switches, and lived independently. She continued to see a therapist weekly and hoped to one day integrate her many alters.

The conversation devolved into her telling me that medication only works if you take it, and that I had to treat my health problem with consistency and care, and me trying to explain that there is something intensely weird and upsetting about the notion that you can only become yourself by ingesting a medication that changes your self.

The cruelty intrinsic to the workhouse system was excused by the need to discourage idleness, much as the malice intrinsic to the mental hospital system has been excused by the need to provide treatment.

The creature who lives inside my brain suggested I do it,” I offered tentatively. “It was very convincing.

The depression was not incapacitating. It made it hard to take a lot of my suburban life seriously, but that was inextricably mingled with a growing consciousness of the larger brutalities of the world. Ethiopian children were starving on the evening news and genocide was mushrooming in Cambodia. Was I truly depressed or just awakening to the First Noble Truth of Buddhism, the insight that samsaric life is misery? My melancholy seemed like simple realism; if you weren't depressed, you obviously didn't know what was going on.

The diagnosis shouldn't have surprised me, as we had been talking about my symptoms for so long. But it's easier to think you just have a bunch of parts inside. Everyone says things like "A part of me wants to go to the movies, but another part of me wants to just stay home." Using the term "part" made me feel normal. I knew I was a little different in that my parts were quite separate aspects of me. I knew my consciousness wasn't whole and knew that it was unusual to have some thoughts come to me in Spanish. I knew most people didn't experience terror and struggle to catch their breath when they were in benign situations. But we hadn't been calling this DID, so I'd been able to avoid fully accepting the implications of having these special parts.

The confusion boys experience about their identity is heightened during adolescence. In many ways the fact that today's boy often has a wider range of emotional expression in early childhood, but if forced to suppress emotional awareness later on makes adolescence all the more stressful for boys. Tragically, were it not for the extreme violence that has erupted among teenage boys throughout our nation, the emotional life of boys would still be ignored. Although therapists tell us that mass media images of male violence and domination teach boys that violence is alluring and satisfying, when individual boys are violent, especially when they murder randomly, pundits tend to behave as though it were a mystery why boys are so violent.

The country is not growing because the mental state of the people are retarded

The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRls). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.

The crime against mental health sufferers has to stop & the stigma must be erased. Humanity has to see the real picture of what mental health sufferers truly experience and humans must understand not outcry.

The depressed person is mired in the past; the manic person is obsessed with the future. Both destroy the present in the process.

The distinction between diseases of "brain" and "mind," between "neurological" problems and "psychological" or "psychiatric" ones, is an unfortunate cultural inheritance that permeates society and medicine. It reflects a basic ignorance of the relation between brain and mind. Diseases of the brain are seen as tragedies visited on people who cannot be blamed for their condition, while diseases of the mind, especially those that affect conduct and emotion, are seen as social inconveniences for which sufferers have much to answer. Individuals are to be blamed for their character flaws, defective emotional modulation, and so on; lack of willpower is supposed to be the primary problem.

The DSM concept of pathological dissociation has evolved from the early inclusive concept of a dissociative reaction in DSM-I to five distinct dissociative disorders in DSM-IV: dissociative amnesia, dissociative fugue, depersonalization disorder, DDNOS, and MPD/DID [Dissociative Identity Disorder]. The first four disorders are rarely challenged, but the existence of MPD/DID has been more or less continually under attack for more than a century. I perceive many of these attacks as misdirected at a mass media stereotype that does not resemble the actual clinical condition.

the essential feature of the Dissociative Disorders is a disruption in the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity,or perception

The existential psychiatrist R. D. Laing--a radical critic, like Brown, of received wisdom, and similarly inclined to see mental illness as a sane response to an insane world, even as a form of "shamanic" journey--described in one of his early books what he called the "ontologically secure" person.

The fatal weakness of most psychiatric historiographies lies in the historians' failure to give sufficient weight to the role of coercion in psychiatry and to acknowledge that mad-doctoring had nothing to do with healing.

The fear of the drugs running out is manageable-the fear of time running down isn’t.

The fear that other people in very scary occasions, reserved only for when they jump out of a plane or hear a strange noise in the middle of the night - that's my normal. ... It's invisible, it's irrational, it's never-ending