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Mental Illness Quotes

Browse 1580 quotes about Mental Illness.

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Mental Illness Quotes

“Gingerbread I knew I had to get out of there before the icing cracked and they discovered that I'm burnt around the edges, doughy in the center, that what they thought was sugar is salt. If I was a good girl, if I could satisfy their cravings, if every dream in my misshapen head didn't bite, I might have stayed at the table. Wouldn't you run, too, from such voracious love?”

WomenFeminismMental IllnessFeminism Identity
Book:Poisoned Apples: Poems for You, My Pretty
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“You aren’t falling apart. You’re well beyond that. You’re just rattling along now. Elven dolls doing what little you can to gather the pieces as they fall away. But you don’t know how to properly reattach them—a doll does not repair itself. So you hug those brittle fragments to your chest until you simply cannot hug anymore. Until you’ve had to leave so many behind that you no longer remember what it is you’re missing.”

LossDespairDepressionDefeatSurrenderMental IllnessGrievingFalling Apart
Book:Where Madness Roosts
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“I exist inside a living hell — not a nightmare, but an unrelenting, screaming abyss with no exit. I am cursed beyond redemption, haunted by horrors that claw at my soul, and possessed by something monstrous that wears my face and mocks my every scream. Every second is torture — not pain, but a divine punishment etched into my bones, burning through my nerves, flooding my skull with fire. I am not alive. I am a condemned vessel, dragged through a waking exorcism that never ends.”

SufferingDespairTraumaMental IllnessIsolationChronic PainExistential DreadPsychological HorrorDystoniaBenzo Withdrawal
Author:Jonathan Harnisch
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“He doesn’t lock the door anymore—not out of courage, but quiet desperation. Each night, he lies there, hollowed and waiting, hoping a stranger might cross the threshold and finish the story he can’t bring himself to end. It isn’t bravery. It’s surrender in disguise. He doesn’t wish for peace, not even sleep—just an ending that isn’t authored by his own hand. A final act. A random mercy. That’s all he asks.”

DespairTraumaSurrenderMental IllnessVulnerabilityHopelessnessPoetic ProseExistential DreadSuicidal IdeationJonathan Harnisch
Book:Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia
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“Les souvenirs mal enfouis vous torturent et s'enfuient par votre bouche just lorsqu'ils ne devraient pas. Et viennent l'agressivité, la rancune, la douleur, toutes les choses punies de solitude et d'isolement car les gens en ont peur. Ils se sentent menacés et vous restez éternellement dans votre cellule et votre rancœur avec la lumière d'éspérance. [Badly buried memories torture you and leak out of your mouth just when they shouldn't. Then comes the anger, the resentment, the pain, all the things punished by seclusion and isolation, because people are afraid of them. They feel threatened, and you remain forever in your prison cell and your bitterness, with a glimmer of hope]”

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Author:Valérie Valère
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“Persons Are Turned against Themselves Evil also turns a person against herself so that self is used against self. The case of the woman who received a dismissal letter from her pastor comes to mind again. The psychological decompensation she suffered was successfully used by her husband to intercede with a psychiatrist of his choosing to commit her to the mental unit of a hospital for an extended involuntary stay, which further worsened her condition. Additional examples abound. Some patients report cults using induced hypnotic states to encourage a subject's dissociated hands and arms to do something hurtful to someone else. In such cases, the subject is encouraged to watch the hand that is hers but not hers (because it is dissociated from her). The end result is often extreme guilt. self-loathing, and distrust of one's self and motives.An incestuous parent may use a child's own natural bodily responses to repeated sexual stimulation to make the point that the child really "wants and enjoys“ what is being forced upon her.”

SelfEvilAbuseGuiltMental IllnessChild AbuseEmotional AbuseDissociative Identity DisorderDissociationChild Sexual AbuseSelf LoathingRitual AbuseHypnosisSatanic Ritual AbuseCultsCult AbusePerpetuation
Book:Trauma and Evil: Healing the Wounded Soul
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“Being Scared-off by Evil Lastly, we deny the presence of evil because we are terrified by the horrendously hurtful, cruel, and bloody kinds of evil people tell us about—if we are willing to listen. This was poignantly brought home during an interdisciplinary case conference involving a resident who was counseling for the first time a woman who had been sexually abused. As we worked with him, it became clear that he was resisting entering what he called the 'psychic cave" of her sealed—off experience from which she was shouting for assistance. Because of his resistance, he was not providing her the support and guidance she so desperately needed, and he was not facilitating her working through the abuse and hurt that were continuing to impact her life. As he was confronted about this at one point in the conference, he stated tearfully: "I'm afraid if I help her move into her memories. I will have to go with her, and if I go with her, my view of the world as a basically good and safe place will be shattered. I'm not sure I can handle that for myself, or be able to think about the fact that my wife and kids may be more vulnerable living in this world than I can be comfortable believing" (Means 1995, 299).”

EvilFearAbuseVictimMental IllnessVulnerabilitySurvivorChild AbusePtsdSexual AbuseWorldviewChild Sexual AbusePsychotherapyCounselingRapidJust WorldNature Of The WorldJust World Beliefs
Book:Trauma and Evil: Healing the Wounded Soul
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“Lingering, bottled-up anger never reveals the 'true colors' of an individual. It, on the contrary, becomes all mixed up, rotten, confused, forms a highly combustible, chemical compound then explodes as something foreign, something very different than one's natural self.”

HeartPainSufferingHopePeaceUnderstandingNaturalBrainCompassionPsychologyGraceEmotionalHealthGoodnessDepressionAnxietyHeartbreakForgivenessMercyAngerPatienceMental HealthRageMental IllnessPityConfusionHeartacheChemistryDisorderSympathyTemperMentalSecrecyHostilityRottenImpatienceUnnaturalCognitionAnger ManagementCombustionPassive AggressiveTrue ColorsCold HeartedForeignBottled UpFlammable
Book:Healology
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“One other thing—she was always armed. Ossie May talked about her gun even more than she bragged about her cooking. Out of nowhere, she took me to the gun range. She finished one clip with her right hand then unloaded the other clip with her left hand. I certainly got the message. She was not to be messed with or messed over. I was scared straight by this woman.”

SadnessAbuseTraumaMemoirMental IllnessManipulationAutobiographySchizophrenicBulliesRaw
Book:Surviving Chaos: How I Found Peace at A Beach Bar
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“A man who under the influence of mental pain or unbearably oppressive suffering sends a bullet through his own head is called a suicide; but for those who give freedom to their pitiful, soul-debasing passions in the holy days of spring and youth there is no name in man's vocabulary. After the bullet follows the peace of the grave: ruined youth is followed by years of grief and painful recollections. He who has profaned his spring will understand the present condition of my soul. I am not yet old, or grey, but I no longer live. Psychiaters tell us that a solider, who was wounded at Waterloo, went mad, and afterwards assured everybody - and believed it himself - that he had died at Waterloo, and that what was now considered to be him was only his shadow, a reflection of the past. I am now experiencing something resembling this semi-death..”

FeelingsSadnessEmotionsMental HealthMental IllnessMentality
Book:The Shooting Party
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“If I could explain my madness, it would be the persistence of a certain feeling--I remember the feeling but I can no longer feel it--the memory of it is vivid, and enough. It came over me around twilight. The intensity of a great, irrevocable loss would wash over me and with it, the absolute certainty that I would not survive it. Strange you can remember the texture of a feeling without feeling it. With this as measure, I know I got better. But I also grew up, and no feeling is final, and I came to understand the waves of feeling, to know this too shall pass. Every once in a while I'll feel a sadness or a loneliness that will remind me of the mad feeling, but it is nowhere as strong, and more importantly, it is never concomitant with the belief that it will last forever.”

SadnessDepressionSuicideMental IllnessSuicidal
Book:Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen
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“Depression is a serious illness. It’s physically painful, debilitating. And you can’t just decide to get over it in the same way you can’t just decide to get over cancer. Sadness is a normal human condition, no different from happiness. You wouldn’t think of happiness as an illness. Sadness and happiness need each other. To exist, each relies on the other.”

HappinessSadnessDepressionMental HealthIllnessMental Illness
Book:I'm Thinking of Ending Things
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“There's a quote from 'The Breakfast Club' that goes "We're all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it." I have it on a poster but I took a Sharpie to it and scratched out the word "hiding" because it reminds me that there's a certain pride and freedom that comes from wearing your unique bizarreness like a badge of honor.”

TruthFunnyDepressionAnxietyOptimismMental IllnessMood Disorders
Author:Jenny Lawson - Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things
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“Being the people we are, and feeling the way that we do, getting excited about going somewhere new can be terrifying. Of course it is, I get it! But if you don’t travel, you’ll regret it. Your soul will forever be empty.”

LifeSoulInspirationSpiritSpiritualitySelf HelpTravelMental HealthInner PeaceZenMental IllnessNewWanderlustGo
Book:From My Suffering: 25 Ways to Break the Chains of Anxiety, Depression & Stress
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“When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive. We come back to life thinner, paler, weaker … but as survivors. Survivors who don’t get pats on the back from coworkers who congratulate them on making it. Survivors who wake to more work than before because their friends and family are exhausted from helping them fight a battle they may not even understand. I hope to one day see a sea of people all wearing silver ribbons as a sign that they understand the secret battle, and as a celebration of the victories made each day as we individually pull ourselves up out of our foxholes to see our scars heal, and to remember what the sun looks like.”

FearDepressionShameMental HealthMental IllnessRecoveryStigmaDepressedSurvivorsMental Health StigmaRecovery QuotesStigmatized
Book:Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things
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“In response to threat and injury, animals, including humans, execute biologically based, non-conscious action patterns that prepare them to meet the threat and defend themselves. The very structure of trauma, including activation, dissociation and freezing are based on the evolution of survival behaviors. When threatened or injured, all animals draw from a "library" of possible responses. We orient, dodge, duck, stiffen, brace, retract, fight, flee, freeze, collapse, etc. All of these coordinated responses are somatically based- they are things that the body does to protect and defend itself. It is when these orienting and defending responses are overwhelmed that we see trauma. The bodies of traumatized people portray "snapshots" of their unsuccessful attempts to defend themselves in the face of threat and injury. Trauma is a highly activated incomplete biological response to threat, frozen in time. For example, when we prepare to fight or to flee, muscles throughout our entire body are tensed in specific patterns of high energy readiness. When we are unable to complete the appropriate actions, we fail to discharge the tremendous energy generated by our survival preparations. This energy becomes fixed in specific patterns of neuromuscular readiness. The person then stays in a state of acute and then chronic arousal and dysfunction in the central nervous system. Traumatized people are not suffering from a disease in the normal sense of the word- they have become stuck in an aroused state. It is difficult if not impossible to function normally under these circumstances.”

MindBodyFearHealingMental HealthMemoryTerrorTraumaMental IllnessTreatmentPtsdFrozenOverwhelmedFreezeTraumatizedHealing TraumaPosttraumatic Stress DisorderFrozen In TimeFight Flight
Author:Peter A. Levine
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“Mental illness" is among the most stigmatized of categories.' People are ashamed of being mentally ill. They fear disclosing their condition to their friends and confidants-and certainly to their employers.”

FearPsychologyDiscriminationMental IllnessBiasDiagnosisStigmaDisclosureMental Health StigmaMental DisorderEmployee RelationsEmployment ContractEmployment RightsEmployment Law
Book:Refusing Care: Forced Treatment and the Rights of the Mentally Ill
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“But the thing is, there's a part of me that's scared. There's a part of me that doesn't want to grow, or change, or let anyone help me get through this stupid problem. Because sometimes it feels like it's everything I have. Or everything I even am. And sometimes, like the nights before shows and the moments after eating something I know I really shouldn't have and when I'm counting my ribs as I'm lying in bed, I can't think of who I'd be without it.”

FearGrowthChangeMental HealthMental IllnessConstants
Book:Four Weeks, Five People
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