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Mental Illness Quotes

Browse 1580 quotes about Mental Illness.

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Mental Illness Quotes

“[I] learned ... that friends are a good source of food and soul when one has not yet gotten the hang of cooking or living (as opposed to dying) alone. That nothing-not booze, not love, not sex, not work, not moving from state to state-will make the past disappear. Only time and patience heal things. I learned that cutting up your arms in an attempt to make the pain move from inside to outside, from soul to skin, is futile. That death is a cop-out. I tried all of these things.”

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Author:Marya Hornbacher
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“I realized that I had granted my illness lordship over me. In viewing my depression as a despot subjecting me to its savage fancies, I was able to escape responsibility, to indulge fully my selfish desire to let my ego flourish unfettered, not obliged to anyone. But this wasn't freedom. It was a prison-a cell separating me from those who cared for me and for whom I might have cared.”

MightAbleDesireResponsibilityEgoDepressionPrisonIllnessSelfishI RealizedMental IllnessGrantedCellsFancySavagesObligedIndulgeSeparatingDespotsLordshipSelfish Desire
Book:Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck: Why We Can't Look Away
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“I could feel myself begin to recede, to tip and lose balance, slide toward the deeper darkness that had crept in from outside. It happened so quickly and took me by surprise; sometimes I just turned around and found it there-ah, camarade-unaware it had been waiting for me for days.”

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Book:All Things Must Fight to Live: Stories of War and Deliverance in Congo
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“... I feel tired to death, paralyzed by this mysteriously wasted life's stubborn concentration on hopelessness and dissolution. It occurs to me that if I lie still like this for long enough, then I'll be dead when I finally wake again, and nothing can ever again torment me, beset me, or present me with evidence of my baseness and decay. That thought is the only one that can comfort me.”

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Book:The blue mother
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“I wondered if I was just the sum of my brain scan, little dots clustered in my frontal lobe. Is that where the poems came from? The desire to destroy myself? This last depression had scared me. It had come on so quickly, not like the gradual woolgathering in my brain I had known before.”

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Book:Food and Loathing: A Life Measured Out in Calories
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“At the end of each therapy session, I waited for an evaluation, a clinical judgment, some kind of pronouncement on "my condition." I hoped I suffered from something serious, a clear syndrome, maybe requiring heavy medication and hospitalization. I pictured myself wearing a robe and paper slippers and looking out of a window with bars on it. I wanted to be relieved of the responsibility of taking any action to help myself.”

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Book:The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky
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“His impression was that he had been imprisoned in a shelter deep down in the underworld of his personality, listening and biding his time while insanity rushed like spring flood through the upper layer of his soul, roaring and crashing, leaving terrible destruction in its wake, a deserted, ravaged country. No, he hadn't been crazy, but something inside him had been crazy.”

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Author:Christer Kihlman
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“When I started writing Tales of the City I was one year away from being a mental illness. It wasn't until 1975 that the American Psychiatric Association took homosexuality off the list of mental illnesses - and in many states, including the state of North Carolina where I grew up, homosexuality was a crime. An arrestable crime. It still is, in many parts of the world.”

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Author:Armistead Maupin
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“Once my loved one accepted the diagnosis, healing began for the entire family, but it took too long. It took years. Can't we, as a nation, begin to speed up that process? We need a national campaign to destigmatize mental illness, especially one targeted toward African Americans. The message must go on billboards and in radio and TV public service announcements. It must be preached from pulpits and discussed in community forums. It's not shameful to have a mental illness. Get treatment. Recovery is possible.”

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Author:Bebe Moore Campbell
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“Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. This is a mental illness. It is like looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. It is as if you are living in a fantasy world of a fable. This is an interesting and sad syndrome. I’m sure that I have that syndrome. If it’s not it, then why the heck does my every moment with the ordinary girl feel like a fable?”

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Author:Joo Won
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“We can and should complain about certain horrors of the modern world, but when it comes to the treatment of mental illness, the advances made in the last hundred years have been far more significant than the space program, nuclear fission, or even The Wire, for so many fortunate people.”

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Book:Rob Delaney: Mother. Wife. Sister. Human. Warrior. Falcon. Yardstick. Turban. Cabbage.
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“Few legislators who passed these mental health laws realized that (Brock) Chisholm and his associates defined mental illness as a sense of loyalty to a particular nation, a sense of loyalty to a moral code, and strict adherence to concepts of right and wrong. Chisholm has been obsessed for years with the idea that instilling concepts of right and wrong, love of country and morality in children by their parents is the paramount evil.”

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Author:John A. Stormer
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“The very term ['mental disease'] is nonsensical, a semantic mistake. The two words cannot go together except metaphorically; you can no more have a mental 'disease' than you can have a purple idea or a wise space". Similarly, there can no more be a "mental illness" than there can be a "moral illness." The words "mental" and "illness" do not go together logically. Mental "illness" does not exist, and neither does mental "health." These terms indicate only approval or disapproval of some aspect of a person's mentality (thinking, emotions, or behavior).”

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Author:E. Fuller Torrey
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“Romantic love is mental illness. But it's a pleasurable one. It's a drug. It distorts reality, and that's the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw. The second you meet someone that you're going to fall in love with you deliberately become a moron. You do this in order to fall in love, because it would be impossible to fall in love with any human being if you actually saw them for what they are.”

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Author:Fran Lebowitz
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“Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her storytelling. With brilliance and courage, the author's brave and candid chronicle travels where no other memoir about mental illness and addiction has gone before. The Third Sunrise is an incredible triumph and Natalie Jeanne Champagne is without a doubt the most important new voice in this genre.”

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Author:Andy Behrman
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“Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.”

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Author:Angela Davis
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“The less control people had over their work, the higher their blood pressure during work hours. Moreover, blood pressure at home was unrelated to the level of job control, indicating that the spike during work hours was specifically caused by lack of choice on the job. People with little control over their work also experienced more back pain, missed more days of work due to illness in general, and had higher rates of mental illness-the human equivalent of stereotypies, resulting in the decreased quality of life common to animals reared in captivity.”

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Author:Sheena Iyengar
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“Before you can kill a demon, you have to be able to say it's name. Names have power. While the word Alzheimer's terrorizes us, it has power over us. When we are prepared to discuss it aloud, we might have power over it. It's thought of as a mental illness and it is a physical illness, affecting the brain. There should be no shame in having it, yet people still don't talk about it”

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Author:Terry Pratchett
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“Having an eating disorder doesn't show ‘strength.’ Strength is when are able to overcome your demons after being sick and tired for so long. Starving is not a ‘diet’ and throwing up isn't something that only extremely thin men or women do. Eating disorders do not discriminate..Neither does any other mental illness. These are deadly diseases that are taking lives daily. So please, let's be cautious of the words we use when discussing ED's and other mental illnesses.”

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Author:Demi Lovato
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