Best 1014 quotes in «mental health quotes» category

I have to share a room. I am expected to sleep mere meters from a woman whose mental ailment is unknown to me. For all I know she might be a cannibal.

I have to choose me.

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 hung back, staring at cars driving past and wondering if they were moving fast enough to knock me down.

I joined social media to get over an unrequited love of real life.

I know it hurts and I know there are days when you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t breathe because of this unbearable lack of something or someone. I know what it’s like to be sad for no reason at all, standing in the rain with no intention of surviving. I know things hurts, I hurt, but life can also be so beautiful… Wonderful things are waiting for you. I know it, I’ve had a taste of it, small moments of complete clarity. Magical nights under the stars and peaceful mornings with someone you love. Before you know it you will thank yourself for staying strong and holding on. I do, most of the days. I know there are days when even one single positive thought feels like too much effort, but you must develop an unconditional love for life. You must never lose your childish curiosity for the possibilities in every single day. Who you can be, what you can see, what you can feel and where it can lead you. Be in love with your life, everything about it. The sadness and the joys, the struggles and the lessons, your flaws and strengths, what you lose and what you gain.

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.

I know the secret that the me lying beneath the sky could not imagine: I know that would go on, that she would grow up, have children and love them, that despite loving them she would get too sick to care for them, be hospitalized, get better, and then get sick again.

I laughed it off but I close the bedroom door and I lose it and I stick it all down here and this is where it all stays. And this is where it has to stay because I am not ending up in the nutter ward again with brown walls, jigsaws, and people crying that their husbands left them, and men slamming their heads against walls, and Mum bringing me a mini trifle and a copy of Smash Hits like that would make everything better. It didn’t. It won’t. It can’t. Psychiatric wards when most of my mates were….I can’t tell anyone what is going on…Can’t write…Can’t think about it. Not even here.

I lied and said I was busy. I was busy; but not in a way most people understand. I was busy taking deeper breaths. I was busy silencing irrational thoughts. I was busy calming a racing heart. I was busy telling myself I am okay. Sometimes, this is my busy - and I will not apologize for it.

I like to compare my mental stress capacity to a dinner plate. Most people have moderate amounts of stress in their life, like a nice balanced meal. The food represents different stresses that occur in our lives, past and present.

I lost someone close to me once . . . Taught me to live in the moment. Life is short, you know?

I'm broken, but I have to learn how to live. I feel stuck together with scotch tape, like after any breath everything could come apart. If it does, if it all comes undone, I think I'll fall down and never rise again.

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 mind the unmindful, but I mind my own mind too. Mine your mind, and mine the minds of others. Mind.. you are mine!

I'm not a good person, sure. But I don't think I'm a bad person either. I feel like abraded is a better word for me. I'm only 22 but I often feel as if I'm twice that. Not in the sense of having wisdom or experience, of course. I just feel worn away by the world. I'm often exhausted and impatient both mentally and physically. I've so quickly become a "get it over with" or "avoid completely" kind of person. It's even ruined my ability to have healthy relationships despite my excitement for romance.

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’m so NUMB. I just don’t care, it seems-but I must do. This is all going to sound totally incoherent. I’m that bunged up, but totally empty. I think my worries about who I am have reached a head. I mean who is Rae Earl? I think I know myself, but then other people say things.

I must stop remembering... The more I remember, the greater my agony. These thoughts stuttered in my mind... I must be more watchful, I told myself. I must shut them out. I couldn't always keep this up.

I'm young, but I'm already screwing up my life. I'm smart but not enough - just smart enough to have problems.

I, myself, spent 9 years in an insane asylum and never had any suicidal tendencies, but I know that every conversation I had with a psychiatrist during the morning visit made me long to hang myself because I was aware that I could not slit his throat.

In 1944-1945, Dr Ancel Keys, a specialist in nutrition and the inventor of the K-ration, led a carefully controlled yearlong study of starvation at the University of Minnesota Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene. It was hoped that the results would help relief workers in rehabilitating war refugees and concentration camp victims. The study participants were thirty-two conscientious objectors eager to contribute humanely to the war effort. By the experiment's end, much of their enthusiasm had vanished. Over a six-month semi-starvation period, they were required to lose an average of twenty-five percent of their body weight." [...] p193 p193-194 "...the men exhibited physical symptoms...their movements slowed, they felt weak and cold, their skin was dry, their hair fell out, they had edema. And the psychological changes were dramatic. "[...] p194 "The men became apathetic and depressed, and frustrated with their inability to concentrate or perform tasks in their usual manner. Six of the thirty-two were eventually diagnosed with severe "character neurosis," two of them bordering on psychosis. Socially, they ceased to care much about others; they grew intensely selfish and self-absorbed. Personal grooming and hygiene deteriorated, and the men were moody and irritable with one another. The lively and cooperative group spirit that had developed in the three-month control phase of the experiment evaporated. Most participants lost interest in group activities or decisions, saying it was too much trouble to deal with the others; some men became scapegoats or targets of aggression for the rest of the group. Food - one's own food - became the only thing that mattered. When the men did talk to one another, it was almost always about eating, hunger, weight loss, foods they dreamt of eating. They grew more obsessed with the subject of food, collecting recipes, studying cookbooks, drawing up menus. As time went on, they stretched their meals out longer and longer, sometimes taking two hours to eat small dinners. Keys's research has often been cited often in recent years for this reason: The behavioral changes in the men mirror the actions of present-day dieters, especially of anorexics.

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.

In 1978, an activist named Judi Chamberlin published one of the movement's most revered manifestos called 'On Our Own: Patient-Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System.' Chamberlin had been diagnosed with a mental illness and found traditional psychiatric intervention unhelpful and even traumatic. She did recover, however, and she credited that recovery to an alternative mental health care facility she stayed at in Canada. Chamberlin and many other madness pride activists believe that people with 'lived experience' should not only have a proverbial seat at the table when it comes to the creation of mental health care systems, but that such people are uniquely equipped to understand what constitutes the best treatment. A slogan Chamberlin sought to make famous was 'Nothing about us without us.

in a society where rigid sex-role differentiation has already outlived its utility, perhaps the androgynous person will come to define a more human standard of psychological health

I never knew anybody, anywhere I have been, who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details, the way a planet looks smooth, from orbit.

In lieu of letting go of our trauma and rather than healing completely, in my experience, we learn how to carry it and there are some days when it is heavier than others. Some days, I hardly know it is there, distracted as I am by present joys and excitement; while other days, the burden is cripplingly-heavy and I can hardly breathe under the weight of grief.

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 lived in an invisible place made of my own dwindling breath, and because no one else could see it, they could not yank me out of it.

In spite of it all I didn't want to die.

Instead of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The ‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high.

In summary, the conclusion that having DID is generally rewarding is unfounded because the vast majority of the attention such patients receive is skeptical, critical, exploitative, or hostile; they are often ignored if they do present symptoms of DID. It is certainly possible that some individuals have attempted to feign the disorder. However, the hostile treatment that one would most likely receive would make feigning another disorder more rewarding.

In the 1980s, research on post traumatic stress disorder in Vietnam veterans was regarded as important, noble, and useful. When the same researchers looked at the same problem in children who had been sexually abused, a tremendous controversy ensued a controversy that persists to this day. There were those who disputed the extent and severity of the sexual abuse that had been uncovered.

In the city Maiguru's brother immediately made an appointment with a psychiatrist. We felt better—help was at hand. But the psychiatrist said that Nyasha could not be ill, that Africans did not suffer in the way we had described. She was making a scene. We should take her home and be firm with her.

In their brief time together Slothrop forms the impression that this octopus is not in good mental health, though where's his basis for comparing?

In the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman: on on hand, the man of reason delegates the physician to madness, thereby authorizing a relation only through the abstract universality of disease; on the other, the man of madness communicates with society only by the intermediary of an equally abstract reason which is order, physical and moral constraint, the anonymous pressure of the group, the requirements of conformity.

In the same way that the women's movement of the seventies and eighties brought rape and incest into public consciousness, we can do the same with the causes and reality of dissociation and multiplicity.

insomnia has this romantic way of making the moon feel like perfect company.

It can be a good thing, too, to learn to sit in your own weirdness.

It dawned on me that we have to breathe and to find reasons to stay alive on our own terms.

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 doesn't really matter how you look in [family holiday] pictures, it just matters that you're there.

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.

I moved in front of the medicine cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play.

In the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman: on one hand, the man of reason delegates the physician to madness, thereby authorizing a relation only through the abstract universality of disease; on the other, the man of madness communicates with society only by the intermediary of an equally abstract reason which is order, physical and moral constraint, the anonymous pressure of the group, the requirements of conformity.

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...