Quotessence
Home / Topics / Mental Health Quotes

Mental Health Quotes

Browse 2417 quotes about Mental Health.

Related topics

Mental Health Quotes

“Happiness" alone does not guarantee mental health and well-being. A tempering dose of disappointment- an occasional taste of frustration and learning that you do recover from it- goes a long way toward producing long-term contentment. Indeed the ability to ride out the bad times without feeling doomed is essential to survival. When happiness is not taken for granted, and when one is acquainted with its opposite it is more easily savored and has more lasting effects.”

“When emotions are expressed...all systems are united and made whole. When emotions are repressed, denied, not allowed to be whatever they may be, our network pathways get blocked, stopping the flow of the vital feel-good, unifying chemicals that run both our biology and our behavior.”

“Theirs was the eternal youth of an alternating self, a youth with the constant although unfulfilled promise of growing up”

“Humor disarms shame. It invites curiosity. It helps us step back from the intensity just long enough to breathe, reflect, and try something new.”

“Healing doesn’t always sound like a breakthrough. Sometimes it whispers in small, quiet choices no one else will ever notice.”

“Let me tell you. Before anything, what you need to do next is talk to these people. Hear their story. Tell yours, and understand you're not the only one who tried to do something good, and ended up doing something horrible. You're not the only one who's been hurt so bad that the hurt becomes part of you, as much as you hate it, that the hurt is you. You're not the only one who was betrayed by a friend, who's had the person they thought they could trust forever end their life. You're not the only one who has felt the madness creep in. Who wants to turn away from it all and keeps turning toward it. You're not the only one who has done some terrible things who will now forever try to make up for that harm. You understand. Don't kill. Don't run. Do what I did. Talk. Listen. And know. As bad as it is, we're in it together.”

“The processing, letting go and healing from an abusive / toxic relationship is an emotionally challenging detachment, especially without (proper) closure. It required a conscientious effort of personal introspection, own behaviour modification, resilience, forgiveness and acceptance to move beyond the realms of just accepting someone else's (false) sense of entitlement, lack of respect and incessant aggressive behaviour tendencies”

“Jesus is not at war with mental health professionals. You can walk hand in hand with both Jesus and a therapist. In fact, you are doing the bravest thing of all by allowing someone in who can walk you through the hard things. We were never meant to go on this journey alone.”

“Abused children often find a way to live through abuse and cope with the aftermath of these experiences. This may result in common trauma responses: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. In adulthood, these trauma responses may continue to resurface as a way of coping with intrusive memories or feelings of shame, guilt, or anger related to the abuse.”

“I'd tell her that recovery would be like the temple: built between an enormous boulder and a cliff's edge. The construction would be perilous, with the laying of every stone risking a drop into the abyss. Her trauma would be the boulder, an unforgiving hard ball within her. It can never be removed. It would never yield, erode, soften. It would take time, and respect for the delicate ecosystem, but she would slowly build something intricate around this boulder. The architecture she assembled encased the boulder, protected it from rolling over the cliff's edge. Every time she needed more building materials, she would have to descend the mountain and carry each brick up. It would break her back, turn her hands and feet hard with callouses, crush her spirit. But when the final tile slotted into place, the painstaking years on the brutal mountainside would be worthwhile in the way the far-reaching views of the landscape from the temple made her catch her breath. She would finally take in the sky and the sea, the colourful boats docked at the harbour below, the verdant rice paddies, and the tiny villages dotted in between the valleys. The boulder and the cliff won't be all she sees any more.”

“I will ask over and over until I die why doctors, therapists, school educators, and counselors are not looking deeply at the individual in front of them and creating a treatment plan with options that heal trauma, offer tools and adaptive coping strategies to navigate their emotional life, and address underlying mental issues before placing that young person on a rapid medicalization pathway that ignores complex dynamics of their personality and experiences.”

“Displacement (shifting a feeling toward one person onto a safer alternative) is considered a neurotic defense, neither primitive nor mature. A person who was yelled at by her boss but could get fired if she yelled back might come home and yell at her dog. Or a woman who felt angry at her mother after a phone conversation might displace that anger onto her son.”

“In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people’s feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty. People do this with teenagers, spouses, addicts, even themselves.”

“You have a breakup, but you didn’t lose a spouse. So friends assume that you’ll move on relatively quickly, and things like these concert tickets become an almost welcome external acknowledgement of your loss—not only of the person but of the time and company and daily routines, of the private jokes and references, and of the shared memories that now are yours alone to carry.”

“...therapy won’t make all my problems disappear, prevent new ones from developing, or ensure that I’ll always act from a place of enlightenment. Therapists don’t perform personality transplants; they just help to take the sharp edges off. A patient may become less reactive or critical, more open and able to let people in. In other words, therapy is about understanding the self that you are. But part of getting to know yourself is to unknow yourself—to let go of the limiting stories you’ve told yourself about who you are so that you aren’t trapped by them, so you can live your life and not the story you’ve been telling yourself about your life.”

“Talking can keep people in their heads and safely away from their emotions. Being silent is like emptying the trash. When you stop tossing junk into the void—words, words, and more words—something important rises to the surface. And when the silence is a shared experience, it can be a gold mine for thoughts and feelings that the patient didn’t even know existed.”

“...by Google-stalking Boyfriend I was holding on to a future that had been canceled. I was watching Boyfriend’s future unfold while I stayed locked in the past. I’d need to accept that his future and mine, his present and mine, were now separate and that all we had left in common was our history.”