Best 1014 quotes in «mental health quotes» category

In this paper I propose the existence of two distinct presentations of DID, a Stable and an Active one. While people with Stable DID struggle with their traumatic past, with triggers that re-evoke that past and with the problems of daily functioning with severe dissociation, people with Active DID are, in addition, also engaged in a life of current, on-going involvement in abusive relationships, and do not respond to treatment in the same way as other DID patients. The paper observes these two proposed DID presentations in the context of other trauma-based disorders, through the lens of their attachment relationship. It proposes that the type, intensity and frequency of relational trauma shape—and can thus predict—the resulting mental disorder. - Through the lens of attachment relationship: Stable DID, Active DID and other trauma-based mental disorders

INTROSPECTION AND INSANITY: A GODELIAN PROBLEM I think it can have suggestive value to translate Godel's Theorem into other domains, provided one specifies in advance that the translations are metaphorical and are not intended to be taken literally. That having been said, I see two major ways of using analogies to connect Godel's Theorem and human thoughts. One involves the problem of wondering about one's sanity. How can you figure out if you are sane? This is a Strange Loop indeed. Once you begin to question your own sanity, you can get trapped in an ever-tighter vortex of self-fulfilling prophecies, though the process is by no means inevitable. Everyone knows that the insane interpret the world via their own peculiarly consistent logic; how can you tell if your own logic is 'peculiar' or not, given that you have only your own logic to judge itself? I don't see any answer. I am just reminded of Godel's second Theorem, which implies that the only versions of formal number theory which assert their own consistency are inconsistent...

Invalidation is about dismissing your experiences, thoughts and above all your emotions. Indeed the intention is to not even allow you to have those thoughts, experiences and emotions. It‟s a way of invading your head and reprogramming it. It‟s psychological abuse (messing with your thoughts) and emotional abuse (messing with your feelings).

Invisible illnesses exist - within body and mind (you just don’t always see the patients taking their pills).

I 'passed' in every sphere of regular life I entered, but I entered those spheres less and less, and spent more and more time under the overpass.

I read and read and read with an intensity I’d never really known before. I mean, I’d always considered myself to be a person who liked books. But there is a difference between liking books and needing them. I needed books.

I remembered during puberty, through the anorexic mists of intermittent menstrual cycles, that man, my father, lifting Shirley's nightdress over her head and asking her in his mocking way to choose what colour condom she wanted. 'Red or yellow?' Which did she choose? I can't remember. Perhaps she alternated. Perhaps there were other colours. It didn't happen once. It happened again and again. I had no power to stop it. That man, my father, had some control over me. I was drugged by the black silence in that big house, the vile whiff of aftershave, the crushing torment of inevitability. My father fucked Shirley using red or yellow condoms and it was those condoms that brought it all to an end. It was my last realization of the day; any more would have been too much to contemplate. That time when my mother had found used condoms in bedroom, he had admitted, after a pointless burst my father's of denial, that he had been going to prostitutes. That was no doubt true but I can't imagine clients take used condoms away with them; prostitutes would surely get rid of the things. No. My father kept those used condoms as a prize. He was fucking his fourteen-year-old-daughter. He was proud of it. Rebecca welled up with tears. Poor thing, she kept saying. Poor thing.

I resolved to come right to the point. "Hello," I said as coldly as possible, "we've got to talk." "Yes, Bob," he said quietly, "what's on your mind?" I shut my eyes for a moment, letting the raging frustration well up inside, then stared angrily at the psychiatrist. "Look, I've been religious about this recovery business. I go to AA meetings daily and to your sessions twice a week. I know it's good that I've stopped drinking. But every other aspect of my life feels the same as it did before. No, it's worse. I hate my life. I hate myself." Suddenly I felt a slight warmth in my face, blinked my eyes a bit, and then stared at him. "Bob, I'm afraid our time's up," Smith said in a matter-of-fact style. "Time's up?" I exclaimed. "I just got here." "No." He shook his head, glancing at his clock. "It's been fifty minutes. You don't remember anything?" "I remember everything. I was just telling you that these sessions don't seem to be working for me." Smith paused to choose his words very carefully. "Do you know a very angry boy named 'Tommy'?" "No," I said in bewilderment, "except for my cousin Tommy whom I haven't seen in twenty years..." "No." He stopped me short. "This Tommy's not your cousin. I spent this last fifty minutes talking with another Tommy. He's full of anger. And he's inside of you." "You're kidding?" "No, I'm not. Look. I want to take a little time to think over what happened today. And don't worry about this. I'll set up an emergency session with you tomorrow. We'll deal with it then." Robert This is Robert speaking. Today I'm the only personality who is strongly visible inside and outside. My own term for such an MPD role is dominant personality. Fifteen years ago, I rarely appeared on the outside, though I had considerable influence on the inside; back then, I was what one might call a "recessive personality." My passage from "recessive" to "dominant" is a key part of our story; be patient, you'll learn lots more about me later on. Indeed, since you will meet all eleven personalities who once roamed about, it gets a bit complex in the first half of this book; but don't worry, you don't have to remember them all, and it gets sorted out in the last half of the book. You may be wondering -- if not "Robert," who, then, was the dominant MPD personality back in the 1980s and earlier? His name was "Bob," and his dominance amounted to a long reign, from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Since "Robert B. Oxnam" was born in 1942, you can see that "Bob" was in command from early to middle adulthood. Although he was the dominant MPD personality for thirty years, Bob did not have a clue that he was afflicted by multiple personality disorder until 1990, the very last year of his dominance. That was the fateful moment when Bob first heard that he had an "angry boy named Tommy" inside of him. How, you might ask, can someone have MPD for half a lifetime without knowing it? And even if he didn't know it, didn't others around him spot it? To outsiders, this is one of the most perplexing aspects of MPD. Multiple personality is an extreme disorder, and yet it can go undetected for decades, by the patient, by family and close friends, even by trained therapists. Part of the explanation is the very nature of the disorder itself: MPD thrives on secrecy because the dissociative individual is repressing a terrible inner secret. The MPD individual becomes so skilled in hiding from himself that he becomes a specialist, often unknowingly, in hiding from others. Part of the explanation is rooted in outside observers: MPD often manifests itself in other behaviors, frequently addiction and emotional outbursts, which are wrongly seen as the "real problem." The fact of the matter is that Bob did not see himself as the dominant personality inside Robert B. Oxnam. Instead, he saw himself as a whole person. In his mind, Bob was merely a nickname for Bob Oxnam, Robert Oxnam, Dr. Robert B. Oxnam, PhD.

I said earlier that making decisions is a key anxiety trigger, If we drill down a bit we can see that this happens because we work to the belief there's a perfect decision out there to be made. But such a thing doesn't exist. And clutching at something that doesn't exist is enough to send anyone into a drowning panic.

I saw now that a part of me never felt good enough for anyone so I tried to be someone I wasn't.

I sometimes sit on my roof. Not to be closer to god. To be further from y'all.

I started something that day. I began creating. Like a stunning, orange-flame phoenix rising from the ashes, I began construction on a new paradigm born from the ruins of old patterns of behavior. I broke the cycle. There was no going back. I was still red-hot angry and looking to fight.

I start to count. This is the important part. I have to count right. Not too fast, nor too slow. All the way to one hundred. It must be spoken aloud, without interruption. Whispering is acceptable; the count keeps my wolf to the Dark Wood. It keeps me on safety’s slender path.

I still had my own notions. How McMurphy was a giant come out of the sky to save us from the combine that was networking the land with copper wire and crystal

It’d be easy to get lost here, in the spaces where I feel like a ghost. A spirit who couldn’t touch, or be touched. It’d be easy, so easy, to drown. But I keep swimming back towards the shore.

It didn't matter that so much of what they said made logical sense- or that I couldn't find any more plausible alternatives. I didn't have multiple personalities, I just didn't - and that was that. And then one day, several years after our first meeting, I walked out of Professor Morton's room and thought. What if he's right? What if there are multiple personalities living in this same body? Suddenly, for the first time in my life. the whole world began to make perfect sense to me.

It feels like I’m stuck in one spot. It’s been this way for a long time. I know you understand, but now you’re moving on without me. And I—I’m not ready to be alone.

It got to the point where it became logical: if a woman was fiercely intelligent, outspoken and passionate, I’d look towards her arms for the scars. They were almost always there.

I think I am suffering from a severe kind of depression, seriously. And there is no shame in accepting it.

It is a rare person who can cut himself off from mediate and immediate relations with others for long spaces of time without undergoing a deterioration in personality.

It is not depression or anxiety that truly hurts us. It is our active resistance against these states of mind and body. If you wake up with low energy, hopeless thoughts, and a lack of motivation - that is a signal from you to you. That is a sure sign that something in your mind or in your life is making you sick, and you must attend to that signal. But what do most people do? They hate their depressed feelings. They think "Why me?" They push them down. They take a pill. And so, the feelings return again and again, knocking at your door with a message while you turn up all the noise in your cave, refusing to hear the knocks. Madness. Open the door. Invite in depression. Invite anxiety. Invite self-hatred. Invite shame. Hear their message. Give them a hug. Accept their tirades as exaggerated mistruths typical of any upset person. Love your darkness and you shall know your light.

It is not the darkness of shadows: one that follows you, haunts you, terrifies you. Instead, it consumes you, becomes you, weighs you down. It IS you. It is comforting. Familiar. I have walked with it. Eaten with it. Loved with it. Smiled with it. Yet I feel it destroying me. Like cancer. But I can’t remove it. It stays inside of me, taunting me to kill it, myself, but it does not realize that this seduction keeps me alive.

It is quite common for people to be nervous or embarrassed about visiting a psychiatrist. It shouldn't be, but it is.

It is time to embrace mental health and substance use/abuse as illnesses. Addiction is a disease.

It is very sad that most of us just aren’t grateful for what we have. If you’re reading this, I think it’s safe to assume that you’re not homeless. You’re not blind. You might be ill, but you’re still alive. And yet, we find it hard to be thankful. To see the gift each day brings us. It is from this lack of true gratitude that we become sad. We have told ourselves over and over that we aren’t happy. That our lives aren’t good. That we’re no good.

It just takes time. I have to ride the roller coaster to the end.

…it seemed to Kirsch that the most reliable guide to the mental landscape of a patient was the patient himself. He was better placed to explain his behaviour and his experiences than anyone else. Yet wherever Kirsch went, the patient was the very last person anyone thought to consult. Because, of course, the patient was insane.

It’s important to point out that mental health is more about wellness rather than sickness.

It’s like you’re always living in your head. . . . Relax and appreciate your surroundings a little.

It's not easy trying to stay afloat when the current keeps pulling you under.

It’s not impermanence per se, or even knowing we’re going to die, that is the cause of our suffering, the Buddha taught. Rather, it’s our resistance to the fundamental uncertainty of our situation. Our discomfort arises from all of our efforts to put ground under our feet, to realize our dream of constant okayness. When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment, or awakening to our true nature, to our fundamental goodness. Another word for that is freedom—freedom from struggling against the fundamental ambiguity of being human.

It sometimes entered Mr. Pontellier's mind to wonder if his wife were not growing a little unbalanced mentally. He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.

It struck Hsing suddenly that Masada didn't even understand the nature of his own genius. To him the patterns of thought and motive that he sensed in the virus were self-explanatory, and those who could not see them were simply not looking hard enough. Yet he would readily admit to his own inability to analyze more human contact, even on the most basic level. That was part and parcel of being iru. What a strange combination of skills and flaws. What an utterly alien profile. Praise the founders of Guera for having taught them all to nurture such specialized talent, rather than seeking to "cure" it. It was little wonder that most innovations in technology now came from the Gueran colonies, and that Earth, who set such a strict standard of psychological "normalcy," now produced little that was truly exciting. Thank God their own ancestors had left that doomed planet before they, too, had lost the genes of wild genius. Thank God they had seen the creative holocaust coming, and escaped it.

It's up to you today to start making healthy choices. Not choices that are just healthy for your body, but healthy for your mind.

It's unfortunate and worth noting that the same word we use to describe [pathological anxiety], we also use to describe our feelings about a high-pressure day at the office. The word 'anxiety', in all of its derivations, is among the most overused in the English language.

It’s unfortunate that inflated self-worth is being mistaken for confidence when it’s really an indication of the opposite. True confidence is reflected through humility, vulnerability and kindness. It’s quiet. It’s subtle. It does not overwhelm. It does not shrink others down to elevate oneself and it doesn’t not knock others down to give the illusion of being above.

It’s worth burning myself out like a match so long as others receive the light and warmth I dispatch.

It takes all my strength to do daily tasks. To some people, I’m just a number. I’m a projected food stamps debit card lifetime member. I’m seen as crazy or insane, but it doesn’t matter. I know I am bigger than my suffering.

It unwound like a coil of string in his chest and he could feel it spreading to his fingertips, the dryness of his bones, the warmth of his blood. For nearly a decade, no one knew how much it hurt to be him.

It was during those years that I discovered that loving [my father] was like sticking a blade into my own heart. It got me nowhere, except awake in the middle of the night, recalling the years when my father was the strongest, the smartest, the funniest, and I lay curled in my bed, wondering why I had been cheated out of a father who loved me, and one I could love in return.

It would've been the perfect time to tell her. To tell anyone. To say, 'I'm drowning and I need someone, anyone, to be my life raft.' To say, 'I thought it had gone, and it hasn't and I'm so scared by what that means.' To say, 'I just want to be normal, why won't my head let me be normal?

I used my mental illness as a springboard to the rest of my life.

I’ve always been so full of melancholy. But I’ve realized it’s because I’m alive. I’m open. I feel. I carry all things in my heart and sometimes I mistake the weight of it for heaviness when it’s really fullness.

I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're fragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy

I've got to that point in life when there's very few thrills and lots of pills seems we all end up this way. As we wait for our final day. But there's one thing about the pills I take. My manic episodes have taken a break

I've come to believe in my bones that children - especially children in poverty - are desperate for an education to help them discover a sense of meaning and purpose. Yet, we have decided to narrow our focus to academic achievement, which creates an unhealthy fixation on grades as a sole indicator of self-worth.

I wanted to grab his mum's face and yell, “I’m not a horrible person, I’m not. But I’m broken too and I’ve never been on the receiving end of this behaviour before and I can’t handle it and I have to look after me first, before anyone else.

I was a kid; I had plenty more to do; I'd been through some crap but I was learning from it

I was always a good girl. I was a straight-A student, top of my class. I did as I was told. I was polite to my elders. I was good to my siblings. I went to church. It was very easy to hide how very bad I was becoming from my family, from everyone. Being good is the best way to be bad.

I was merely a body that existed day in, day out. Breathing against the powerful waves of time.