Best 1014 quotes in «mental health quotes» category

They'll want to kill the crazies first. Big fish eat little fish -- always have, always will.

They're simply seeking an interlude from emotional pain and searing mental agony, a sleep from which they'll awaken to discover they're the person they always wanted to be.

They slow your brain down," he said, clutching an orange bottle of pills. "They iron out all the wrinkles...Maybe all the bad stuff happens in the wrinkles, but all the good stuff does, too... "They break your brain like a horse, so it takes all your orders. I need a break that can break away, you know? I need to think. If I can't think, who am I?

They slow your brain down," he said, clutching an orange bottle of pills. "They iron out all the wrinkles...Maybe all the bad stuff happens in the wrinkles, but all the good stuff does, too... "They break your brain like a horse, so it takes all your orders. I need a brain that can break away, you know? I need to think. If I can't think, who am I?

They want you to be in a special ward,” my mother said. “They don’t have that sort of ward at our hospital.” “I liked it where I was.” My mother’s mouth tightened. “You should have behaved better, then.” “What?” “You shouldn’t have broken that mirror. Then maybe they’d have let you stay.” But of course I knew the mirror had nothing to do with it

Things that have happened to me that have generated more sympathy than depression Having tinnitus. Scalding my hand on an oven, and having to have my hand in a strange ointment-filled glove for a week. Accidentally setting my leg on fire. Losing a job. Breaking a toe. Being in debt. Having a river flood our nice new house, causing ten thousand pounds’ worth of damage. Bad Amazon reviews. Getting the norovirus. Having to be circumcised when I was eleven. Lower-back pain. Having a blackboard fall on me. Irritable bowel syndrome. Being a street away from a terrorist attack. Eczema. Living in Hull in January. Relationship break-ups. Working in a cabbage-packing warehouse. Working in media sales (okay, that came close). Consuming a poisoned prawn. Three-day migraines.

Thing was, after the hurricane, life went on. You had to buy milk, fix the broken windows, play some Warhammer, discuss some girls. Wow!

Thinking - thinking real hard. My grandmother knew when I was down. She knew what to do She would encourage me to engage in "self-care" and would do all manner of therapeutic things for me Sometimes, our ForeMothers knew how to spot mental illness and help us! She would mix some oils and ask me to breathe in and out... or boil some herbs and ask me to bask in the steam She would send me to work in the field - because the closer we are to the EARTH the grounded we become She would sing for me - and then pray

This body had been mine my entire life and it couldn't have felt more foreign.

This feeling will pass. The fear is real but the danger is not.

This is a case of fighting fire with fire, of tackling stigma by deciding to laugh in stigma's face and then file our nails. It can feel incredibly giddy and intense, so treat yourself to a nice glass nail file that will hold up through the years. You'll need it.

This is how you explain how you feel: broken words and hard truths.

This is how every fairy tale starts. With the storyteller explaining to the reader just how it is. There once was a girl named Milly who was the wolf’s coveted meal. Whose father left her in the clutches of an evil stepmother. Whose stepmother imprisoned her with monsters.

This isn't a place for lies or pretending everything's all right. We know everything is not all right. If it were, you wouldn't be here. Now. Where did you go?

This is what I would want to tell my teenage self. You have to turn now to all the other wounded people around you, and find a way to connect with them, and build a home with these people, together - a place where you are bonded to one another and find meaning in your lives together. We have been tribeless and disconnected for so long now. It's time for us all to come home.

This negativity of my mind Is to blame For missing loving And being loved

This vacillation between assertion and denial in discussions about organised abuse can be understood as functional, in that it serves to contain the traumatic kernel at the heart of allegations of organised abuse. In his influential ‘just world’ theory, Lerner (1980) argued that emotional wellbeing is predicated on the assumption that the world is an orderly, predictable and just place in which people get what they deserve. Whilst such assumptions are objectively false, Lerner argued that individuals have considerable investment in maintaining them since they are conducive to feelings of self—efficacy and trust in others. When they encounter evidence contradicting the view that the world is just, individuals are motivated to defend this belief either by helping the victim (and thus restoring a sense of justice) or by persuading themselves that no injustice has occurred. Lerner (1980) focused on the ways in which the ‘just world’ fallacy motivates victim-blaming, but there are other defences available to bystanders who seek to dispel troubling knowledge. Organised abuse highlights the severity of sexual violence in the lives of some children and the desire of some adults to inflict considerable, and sometimes irreversible, harm upon the powerless. Such knowledge is so toxic to common presumptions about the orderly nature of society, and the generally benevolent motivations of others, that it seems as though a defensive scaffold of disbelief, minimisation and scorn has been erected to inhibit a full understanding of organised abuse. Despite these efforts, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in organised abuse and particularly ritualistic abuse (eg Sachs and Galton 2008, Epstein et al. 2011, Miller 2012).

This was a characteroloical prelude, but it wasn’t chemical or somatic. It was the anatomy of melancholy, not the anatomy of his brain.

This will sound strange, and yet I'm sure it was the point: it was a bit like being high. That, for me, anyway, had always been the attraction of drugs, to stop the brutal round of hypercritical thinking, to escape the ravages of an unoccupied mind cannibalizing itself.

Those with dissociative disorders face a big enough battle living as multiples and dealing with past trauma. Like everyone else, they deserve to be heard and recognised, not stigmatised.

Thoughts… Be aware of what you’re thinking about. Make sure that you’re not allowing your mind to be preoccupied with a person or a problem so much so that it’s all you think about, talk about, dream about or feel about. If you’re connecting your problems and issues to everything that other people are saying and doing, you’re obsessing and you are disconnected from God.

Throughout our times with Christopher [therapist] we were encouraged to work together at communicating on the inside. He pointed out that it would be good for us all to listen-in when an alter was telling his/her story - that it's now safe, no harm will come to us from telling or from knowing. There was once a time when it was very important that we didn't know what had happened; that knowing meant danger or being so overwhelmed with pain and grief that we wouldn't survive. But now it was different. We're safe and strong, and our goal now are to uncover the grisly truth of what's happened to us, so that it's no longer a powerful secret. We can look at it and face the past for what it is - old memories of old events. Today is now,and we can choose to live a different way and believe different things. We were once powerless and vulnerable, but now we were in a position to make choices. We had control over our life.

Thus I remained to myself an unhappy lodging where I could neither stay nor leave. For where could my heart fly from my heart? Where could I fly from my own self?

Throughout the journey West, I had a raging fever. In a mere two days, we drove 1,925 miles from Connecticut to Colorado Springs, where we chose to break our journey. The further West we went, the sicker I seemed to become. As though the turmoil, rage, and grief within me were tightening their coiled grip, sensing that something was coming that would force it to relinquish their hold.

To actually accept that you have an eating disorder or a mental health issue is actually a sign of great, great strength. It is not a sign of weakness at all.

Through the vehicle of our emotions, our mind, body, and spirit are sending signals that something has to shift.

Time passes no matter what you do.

To say a person with a symptom is behaving in a way that is not of the ordinary implies that there is an ordinary way to behave.

To be psychologically healthy, we have to believe that what we do has some effect on what happens to us. Even if the perception of control is delusional, it usually leads to more productive action than believing that what we do makes no difference.

Today was very full, but the problem isn't today. It's tomorrow. I'd be able to recover from today if it weren't for tomorrow. There should be extra days, buffer days, between real days.

to do list (after the breakup) 1. take refuge in your bed 2. cry. till the tears stop (this will take a few days). 3. don’t listen to slow songs. 4. delete their number from your phone even though it is memorized on your fingertips. 5. don’t look at old photos. 6. find the closest ice cream shop and treat yourself to two scoops of mint chocolate chip. the mint will calm your heart. you deserve the chocolate. 7. buy new bed sheets. 8. collect all the gifts, t-shirts, and everything with their smell on it and drop it off at a donation center. 9. plan a trip. 10. perfect the art of smiling and nodding when someone brings their name up in conversation. 11. start a new project. 12. whatever you do. do not call. 13. do not beg for what does not want to stay. 14. stop crying at some point. 15. allow yourself to feel foolish for believing you could’ve built the rest of your life in someone else’s stomach. 16. breathe.

To evade insanity and depression, we unconsciously limit the number of people toward whom we are sincerely sympathetic.

To resist a compulsion with willpower alone is to hold back an avalanche by melting the snow with a candle. It just keeps coming and coming and coming.

To the men and women who changed Cheryl Hersha's life, she was a continuation of the research that had first been conducted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Dr. Morton Prince. He encountered a woman named Miss Beauchamp, a nursing student who was referred to the psychiatrist because of health problems. As he worked with her, Prince discovered that she had four separate personalities (dissociated ego states) that existed independently of one another within the same body. Though he tried, Dr. Prince never understood Miss Beauchamp, nor was he able to help her. When he died, his wife had the woman committed to an insane asylum for the rest of her life. However, Prince's careful documentation of Beauchamp's symptoms, actions and family history (extreme child abuse beginning before the age of seven) provided information needed to develop the techniques for contemporary, routinely successful treatment of what would be called Multiple Personality Disorder.

Tracing the pattern of the blanket with my fingertips, I decide to give myself another chance. I think I'm going to be kinder to myself; more accepting. I need to learn to live my life my way.

To being far away from everything and everyone - Stefanie Sybens, Letters from the What-Went-Before

To deny someone's feelings or experiences it to literally deny their reality.

Too often the survivor is seen by [himself or] herself and others as "nuts," "crazy," or "weird." Unless her responses are understood within the context of trauma. A traumatic stress reaction consists of *natural* emotions and behaviors in response to a catastrophe, its immediate aftermath, or memories of it. These reactions can occur anytime after the trauma, even decades later. The coping strategies that victims use can be understood only within the context of the abuse of a child. The importance of context was made very clear many years ago when I was visiting the home of a Holocaust survivor. The woman's home was within the city limits of a large metropolitan area. Every time a police or ambulance siren sounded, she became terrified and ran and hid in a closet or under the bed. To put yourself in a closet at the sound of a far-off siren is strange behavior indeed—outside of the context of possibly being sent to a death camp. Within that context, it makes perfect sense. Unless we as therapists have a good grasp of the context of trauma, we run the risk of misunderstanding the symptoms our clients present and, hence, responding inappropriately or in damaging ways.

To say I woke up one day and reached a point where I no longer cared about the pains to befall me would be a lie. Nor can I say that I have ever fully forgiven those who willfully did me harm. On a deep, internal battlefield, I wrestle with the thought that I have been robbed of any chance of normalcy by the losses suffered. Therapists and gurus alike tell us to, “Let go or be dragged,” as Zen proverb urges—to forgive for our own sake. But, in my experience, there is no letting go and forgiveness is transient. My inability to be free of it all isn’t for lack of an evolved consciousness on my part. I’ve “done the work” to process it all; rather, it is my irreconcilable, inescapable humanity that causes to clutch the pain close to me.

True emotional healing doesn't happen without feeling. The only way out is through.

True suffering is being trapped in your own head.

Truth and justice are commonly found in the personality of the paranoid delusional

Truth? Sometimes I question every last thing I’m doing. Truth? Right now, those questions swirl every damn day. Is this also true for you? Still, we keep moving forward, you and I. We try new things. We doggedly keep on doing the old things because though they may not have worked in the past it doesn’t feel like crazy to continue, it feels like the space of trusting some wild sort of knowing. We love, good and hard. We show up for life. In the midst of depression, insanely messy houses, and bank accounts sliding closer and closer to that fine red line, and panic attacks, and kids who won’t listen but who damn well know how to question and love. And we make stuff. My god, the way we keep on making stuff. Because we can and we have to. Because it’s the only damn thing that feels right when everything else feels a hundred kinds of wrong. We create. Defiant and determined and true. Weary hearts brought to blazing life if only for those wild moments we dance with the muse.

Unhinging reason temporarily can sometimes be the only rational response to an insane world.

Understanding what the narcissist finds threatening, entertaining and complimentary can be extremely helpful when deciding how best to “repackage” yourself- if this is what you want to do.

Under the heading of "defense mechanisms,” psychoanalysis describes a number of ways in which a person becomes alienated from himself. For example, repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection. These "mechanisms" are often described in psychoanalytic terms as themselves "unconscious,” that is, the person himself appears to be unaware that he is doing this to himself. Even when a person develops sufficient insight to see that "splitting", for example, is going on, he usually experiences this splitting as indeed a mechanism, an impersonal process, so to speak, which has taken over and which he can observe but cannot control or stop. There is thus some phenomenological validity in referring to such "defenses" by the term "mechanism.” But we must not stop there. They have this mechanical quality because the person as he experiences himself is dissociated from them. He appears to himself and to others to suffer from them. They seem to be processes he undergoes, and as such he experiences himself as a patient, with a particular psychopathology. But this is so only from the perspective of his own alienated experience. As he becomes de-alienated he is able first of all to become aware of them, if he has not already done so, and then to take the second, even more crucial, step of progressively realizing that these are things he does or has done to himself. Process becomes converted back to praxis, the patient becomes an agent.

Unfortunately, it hurts all three of my feelings.

Unlike ‘mere’ medical or physical disorders, mental disorders are not just problems. If successfully navigated, they can also present opportunities. Simply acknowledging this can empower people to heal themselves and, much more than that, to grow from their experiences.

Upon reflection, I marvel that no one saw through me enough to bundle me off to the nearest mental institution. The fact that it didn't happen depended less on my being a good actress than the fact that I was surrounded, as I had been all my life, by strangers.

Varya has had enough therapy to know that she's telling herself stories. She knows her faith--that rituals have power, that thoughts can change outcomes or ward off misfortune--is a magic trick: fiction, perhaps, but necessary for survival. And yet, and yet: Is it a story if you believe it?