Best 923 quotes in «mental illness quotes» category

If there is something intangible about mental illness generally, depression is all the harder to define because it tends to creep in rather than announce itself, manifesting itself as an absence - of appetite, energy, sociability - rather than as a presence. There is little you can point to: no obscene rantings, no sudden flips into unrecognizable, hyper-energize behavior, no magical belief systems involving lottery numbers or fortune cookies. It seems to me that we are suspicious of depression’s claim to legitimacy in party because it doesn’t look crazy.

If the social stress is physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, the way to treat the depression is to stop the abuse. Unfortunately, advocates of the biochemical treatment of depression have gone along with the view of academic theory and popular culture that the problem is entirely within the skull of the victim. Enthusiasm for biochemical treatment and research is partly due to the fact that it helps perpetuate the myth that suicide and depression should be treated by changing the victim, not by changing ourselves. As long as we have a narrow view of the causes of biochemical imbalance, such as limiting it to innate genetic defects, we can practice denial on the social complicity in the causation of suicide. The narrow view does nothing to help reduce pain and increase resources for the millions of people whose problems do not respond to medications. It also deprives us of an opportunity for progress in a much broader area for social reform. The dynamics behind the oppression of the suicidal is similar to the dynamics of other forms of injustice; progress in one area can support progress in other areas.

[If there was] certainty that an acute episode [of depression] will last only a week, a month, even a year, it would change everything. It would still be a ghastly ordeal, but the worst thing about it — the incessant yearning for death, the compulsion toward suicide — would drop away. But no, a limited depression, a depression with hope, is a contradiction. The experience of convulsive pain, along with the conviction that it will never end except in death — that is the definition of a severe depression.

If the whole world seems like it's against you, it helps to know that you've still got home. A safe place. It just takes one person—a teacher, a friend, a parent. If I didn't have you and Dad, if you hadn't made it so clear you loved me as much as you did, or if you'd said, 'yeah, why don't you do it, and put yourself out of our misery, just shut up,' I would have killed myself. I really would have. I spent most of those days wishing I were dead anyway, and what always stopped me was the fact that doing so would destroy the lives of the only people who ever cared about me.

If two people with no symptoms in common can both receive the same diagnosis of schizophrenia, then what is the value of that label in describing their symptoms, deciding their treatment, or predicting their outcome, and would it not be more useful simply to describe their problems as they actually are? And if schizophrenia does not exist in nature, then how can researchers possibly find its cause or correlates? If psychiatric research has made so little progress in recent decades, it is in large part because everyone has been barking up the wrong tree. It is not a question of getting a bigger and better scanner, but of going right back to the drawing board. What’s more, medical-type labels can be as harmful as they are hollow. By reducing rich, varied, and complex human experiences to nothing more than a mental disorder, they not only sideline and trivialize those experiences but also imply an underlying defect that then serves as a pseudo-explanation for the person’s disturbed behaviour. This demeans and disempowers the person, who is deterred from identifying and addressing the important life problems that underlie his distress.

If you are sitting in the dark (due to depression) go turn the light on. If you can't find the light switch, seek the help of someone who can.

If you can still wipe your own backside then life's not that bad!

If you can sit with your pain, listen to your pain and respect your pain — in time you will move through your pain.

If you could read my mind, you wouldn't be smiling.

If you do finish the book and are still scared of me and people of my ilk, then I recommend you schedule an appointment with a therapist. Either that, or try writing your own book

If you do not look like an ordinary person, it means that you are suffering from a mental disorder. Which one of? Do not worry! Psychologists will find a name for your mental illness. Their minds are too creative for this purpose.

If you have a monster inside of you, please teach it how to jump, and laugh, and fly and catch fish! Please teach it to climb mountains to watch sunsets and wade in ponds to feel moonlight. Please love your monster, tell it that it has a home, teach it that it has a place in this world, maybe it likes ice cream, maybe marshmallows make it smile, maybe it goes to beautiful places in its dreams at night. One day it will sit atop a clocktower and cast sunbeams onto everyone! Because it will learn that! Because angels are too busy to do that, but monsters are not. Monsters would love to catch sunbeams and eat sugar donuts. Teach your monsters, they will form moonbeams one day!

I have a mental illness, but that doesn't stop me from being mentally capable.

If you're selfish enough to kill yourself write your suicide note on the back of your will

If you want your Demons to go away quit using the words they taught you to say

I graciously survived depression, mental-illness and attempt of suicide.

I hadn’t thought about prom, Bailey, or that car crash in years. I’d been under the assumption that therapy had wiped it from my mind completely. The search for Lizzie was doing something to me. Causing me to regress, in a way. Bailey Shepherd was no one to me, but at the same time, she was everything. My cause and value of life forever changed by a girl buried in a labyrinth of gnarled alloy and gasoline.

I have never seen battles quite as terrifyingly beautiful as the ones I fight when my mind splinters and races, to swallow me into my own madness, again.

I have suffered pains and torture of all natures. I have heard many say, "I am a survivor." I am not in a boat in a sea of torture awaiting to be rescued. I am a Conqueror, I am a Victor... I am one with myself. I AM FREE!

I hear a siren and, if we weren’t already in a hospital, I would have assumed they were coming for nearly everyone in this room.

I honestly didn’t realize at the time that I was dealing with myself. But I suppose it’s true that I developed a therapy that provides the things I needed for so many years and never got.

I just want to get away from me.

If you put the wrong foods in your body, you are contaminated and dirty and your stomach swells. Then the voice says, Why did you do that? Don't you know better? Ugly and wicked, you are disgusting to me.

if your brain changes in response to experience, then you have the opportunity to deliberately help your brain change again based on new experiences you create.

I guess I was falling in love. I think she was just falling.

I have a mind like a sieve, where sadness sits and happiness slips

[I have] occasional depersonalization disorder, (which makes me feel utterly detached from reality, but in less of a "this LSD is awesome" kind of way and more of a "I wonder what my face is doing right now" and "it sure would be nice to feel emotions again" sort of thing).

I'm here, I said, but I knew, increasingly, I wasn't here, and I felt that able-to-weep-and-be-seen version of myself that I'd been with Ruth hardening again, like warm caramel left to cool.

I know, Little Man, you are quick with the diagnosis of craziness when you meet a truth you don’t like. And you feel yourself as the ‘homo normalis’. You have locked up crazy people, and the normal people manage this world. Who then is to blame for all the misery? Not you, of course, you only do your duty, and who are you to have an opinion of your own? I know, you don’t have to repeat it. It isn’t you that matters, Little Man. But when I think of your newborn children, of how you torture them in order to make them into ‘normal’ human beings after your image.

I know it's irrational," I tell her, because I do know that. I know that you can't live your life waiting for disaster to strike. I know this. Hell, if we all lived like that, we'd stay stock-still our entire lives or be forced to roll around the streets in those giant plastic bubbles. But it's like my mind and my brain are two separate things, working against each other. I can't get them to cooperate.

Illness is always an interaction between [mind and body]. It can begin in the mind and affect the body, or it can begin in the body and affect the mind, both of which are served by the same bloodstream. Attempts to treat most mental diseases as though they were completely free of physical causes and attempts to treat most bodily diseases as though the mind were in no way involved must be considered archaic in the light of new evidence about the way the human body functions.

Illness is a story told in the past tense.

I'll say it again - mental illness is a physical illness. You wouldn't consider going up to someone suffering from Alzheimers to yell, "Come on, get with it, you remember where you left your keys?" Let us shout it from the rooftops until everyone gets the message; depression has and nothing to do with having a bad day or being sad, it's a killer if not taken seriously.

I look back on my life the way one watches a badly scripted action flick, sitting at the edge of the seat, bursting out, "No, no, don't open that door! The bad guy is in there and he'll grab you and put his hand over your mouth and tie you up and then you'll miss the train and everything will fall apart!" Except there is no bad guy in this tale. The person who jumped through the door and grabbed me and tied me up was, unfortunately, me. My double image, the evil skinny chick who hisses, Don't eat. I'm not going to let you eat. I'll let you go as soon as you're thin, I swear I will. Everything will be okay when you're thin.

I'm not crazy, I was abused. I'm not shy, I'm protecting myself. I'm not bitter, I'm speaking the truth. I'm not hanging onto the past, I've been damaged. I'm not delusional, I lived a nightmare. I'm not weak, I was trusting. I'm not giving up, I'm healing. I'm not incapable of love, I'm giving. I'm not alone. I see you all here. I'm fighting this.

I mean, that's at least in part why I ingested chemical waste - it was a kind of desire to abbreviate myself. To present the CliffNotes of the emotional me, as opposed to the twelve-column read. I used to refer to my drug use as putting the monster in the box. I wanted to be less, so I took more - simple as that. Anyway, I eventually decided that the reason Dr. Stone had told me I was hypomanic was that he wanted to put me on medication instead of actually treating me. So I did the only rational thing I could do in the face of such as insult - I stopped talking to Stone, flew back to New York, and married Paul Simon a week later.

I'm not manic-just happy. It has been such a long time since I was happy. Please join me on my magic carpet for now.

I’m not flailing now, as my muscles are rigid with the tension of holding myself together. The pain over my heart returns, and from it I imagine tiny fissures spreading out into my body. Through my torso, down my arms and legs, over my face, leaving it crisscrossed with cracks. One good jolt … and I could shatter into strange, razor-sharp shards.

I'm Bipolar but as normal as you except for the times my mind thinks like two

I myself must also say I believe it is true that in the end humanitarianism will triumph; only I fear that at the same time the world will be one big hospital and each person will be the other person's humane keeper.

In 1949, neurologist Egas Moniz (1874-1955) received a Nobel Prize for his discovery of ‘the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses’. Today, prefrontal leucotomy is derided as a barbaric treatment from a much darker age, and it is to be hoped that, one day, so too might antipsychotic drugs.

I need them to be aware and present with me in the midst of the storm, not just tell me what to do.

I needed some space to lay myself out, so that I could decide which pieces I wanted to pick up.

In job interviews they’d ask me, What’s your greatest weakness? and I’d explain that I’ll probably spend a good portion of the workday terrorized by thoughts I’m forced to think, possessed by a nameless and formless demon, so if that’s going to be an issue, you might not want to hire me.

In exchange for institutionalization, people with mental illness today have been provided with splendid autonomy. But this particular bland of autonomy comes with a price. It’s an autonomy that allows them to survive however they may: on their own if they can, in the homes of their families available to support them–if they happen to have families available to support them–or on the streets and in prisons if they don’t. In any case, the beauty of this system is that the treatment they presently receive is killing them earlier than ever, so there will be less cost to the system than ever.

In retrospect, crappy chemicals in my brain were working overtime, driving me to destroy myself, like that thing that makes lemmings throw them¬selves over a cliff.

In my more lucid moments I realized that insanity was a fairly reasonable explanation for what was happening to me. The problem was that it wasn't useful information. Realizing I was crazy didn't make the crazy stuff stop happening. Nor did it give me any clues about what I should do next.

I now know for certain that my mind and emotions, my fix on the real and my family's well-being, depend on just a few grams of salt. But treatment's the easy part. Without honesty, without a true family reckoning, that salt's next to worthless.

In our family "whim-wham" is code, a defanged reference to any number of moods and psychological disorders, be they depressive, manic, or schizoaffective. Back in the 1970s and '80s - when they were all straight depression - we called them "dark nights of the soul." St. John of the Cross's phrase ennobled our sickness, spiritualized it. We cut God out of it after the manic breaks started in 1986, the year my dad, brother, and I were all committed. Call it manic depression or by its new, polite name, bipolr disorder. Whichever you wish. We stick to our folklore and call it the whim-whams.

Insanity? The mental processes of a man with whom one disagrees, are always wrong. Where is the line between wrong mind and sane mind? It is inconceivable that any sane man can radically disagree with one's most sane conclusions.