Quotessence
Home / Topics / Suicide Quotes

Suicide Quotes

Browse 2485 quotes about Suicide.

Related topics

IfsCommitPeopleSuicidalDeathThinkingSuicidal ThoughtsMenKnowsInspirationalWayMotivationalWantDiesWorldCommitting SuicideHealthyCommittedWell BeingMurderShouldTryingYearsBombersSuicide BombersEndsDoePersonsProblemMindSaidGivingKindDyingReasonHas BeensNeedsBelieveFeelsHumansFunnyLittlesWritingChildrenLooksMadeMightSuicide NoteKillingLife IsMayMeanPainStillsWarChoicesFirstsMomentsWellsI CanLongMoralEnoughSelf HarmFeltHandsPoliticalSelfTwoWould BeHeartHelpingIdeasMatterCausesFactsFormNotesRateSeemsSometimesWantedBodyDifferentLastsLeftRealSufferingTerribleYoungBombingDiedGunHumorLiteratureLyingRememberAssisted SuicideBombsCasesmore

Suicide Quotes

“The disease concept of homosexuality as with the disease concept of all so-called mental illnesses, such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or suicide conceals the fact that homosexuals are a group of medically stigmatized and socially persecuted individuals. ... Their anguished cries of protest are drowned out by the rhetoric of therapy just as the rhetoric of salvation drowned out the [cries] of heretics.”

FactsIndividualGroupsCryDrugDiseaseConceptsSuicideSalvationAddictionIllnessMental IllnessTherapyProtestRhetoricHomosexualityHomosexualAlcoholismDrug AddictionHereticDrug AddictPersecuted
Book:The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement
Create image

“When one of us dies of cancer, loses her mind, or commits suicide, we must not blame her for her inability to survive an ongoing political mechanism bent on the destruction of that human being. Sanity remains defined simply by the ability to cope with insane conditions.”

MindHumansPoliticalDiesLosesHuman BeingsAbilityConditionsDestructionBlameRemainsSuicideCancerIllnessCommitMental IllnessInsaneOppressionDefinedSanityMechanismBentInabilityOngoing
Book:Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma
Create image

“Countries with the best-resourced medical services have the best outcomes for physical illness (it is better to have a heart attack in Washington or London than in rural Africa) whereas precisely the opposite is the case for mental illness (developing nations with limited psychiatric resources have better outcomes and lower suicide rates).”

HeartCountryNationsCasesResourcesOppositesSuicideRateIllnessLondonMedicalMental IllnessDevelopingOutcomesHeart AttackPsychiatric
Author:Richard Bentall
Create image

“Number one, we have to talk about mental illnesses. Number two, you can actually address things from a purer and honest direct line to what's been going on in your life and how you've been feeling and why you think the way you think. I do think there is a genetic predisposition for mental illness, for depression, for suicide, but I also think that lifestyle can change things. If you're an addict, if you drink and you're putting a depressant into your body, it's going to cause serious problems.”

ThinkingFeelingsProblemHonestSeriousDrinkDirectSuicideIllnessLifestyleMental IllnessAddict
Author:Mariel Hemingway
Create image

“It is tempting when looking at the life of anyone who has committed suicide to read into the decision to die a vastly complex web of reasons; and, of course, such complexity is warranted. No one illness or event causes suicide; and certainly no one knows all, or perhaps even most, of the motivations behind the killing of the self. But psychopathology is almost always there, and its deadliness is fierce. Love, success, and friendship are not always enough to counter the pain and destructiveness of severe mental illness”

KnowsSelfReasonEnoughPainMotivationDiesCoursesCausesDecisionBehindsEventsSuicideComplexesKillingIllnessCommittedMental IllnessComplexityFierceSevereTemptingPsychopathologyDestructiveness
Author:Kay Redfield Jamison
Create image

“There's something in us that is very much attracted to madness. Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt at least a faint, morbid urge to jump. And anyone who has ever put a loaded pistol up to his head... All right, my point is this: even the most well-adjusted person is holding onto his or her sanity by a greased rope. I really believe that. The rationality circuits are shoddily built into the human animal.”

BelieveHumansWellsLooksPersonsFeltAnimalBuildingDepressionBuiltMadnessSuicideEdgesMental IllnessUrgesTallSanityRationalityRopeHolding OnLoadedCircuitsMorbidPistolsSelf HarmHuman AnimalTall Buildings
Author:Stephen King
Create image

“One in two recently evicted mothers reports multiple symptoms of clinical depression, double the rate of similar mothers who were not forced from their homes. Even after years pass, evicted mothers are less happy, energetic, and optimistic than their peers. When several patients committed suicide in the days leading up to their eviction, a group of psychiatrists published a letter in Psychiatric Services, identifying eviction as a “significant precursor of suicide.” The letter emphasized that none of the patients were facing homelessness, leading the psychiatrists to attribute the suicides to eviction itself. “Eviction must be considered a traumatic rejection,” they wrote, “a denial of one’s most basic human needs, and an exquisitely shameful experience.” Suicides attributed to evictions and foreclosures doubled between 2005 and 2010, years when housing costs soared.”

PovertyDepressionSuicideMental IllnessHomelessnessEviction
Book:Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Create image

“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
Create image

“If the social stress is physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, the way to treat the depression is to stop the abuse. Unfortunately, advocates of the biochemical treatment of depression have gone along with the view of academic theory and popular culture that the problem is entirely within the skull of the victim. Enthusiasm for biochemical treatment and research is partly due to the fact that it helps perpetuate the myth that suicide and depression should be treated by changing the victim, not by changing ourselves. As long as we have a narrow view of the causes of biochemical imbalance, such as limiting it to innate genetic defects, we can practice denial on the social complicity in the causation of suicide. The narrow view does nothing to help reduce pain and increase resources for the millions of people whose problems do not respond to medications. It also deprives us of an opportunity for progress in a much broader area for social reform. The dynamics behind the oppression of the suicidal is similar to the dynamics of other forms of injustice; progress in one area can support progress in other areas.”

SocietyDepressionStressSuicideMental IllnessDenialMedicationBiochemical TreatmentSocial Complicity
Book:Out of the Nightmare: Recovery from Depression and Suicidal Pain
Create image

“The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain.”

PainSufferingPsychologyAwarenessDepressionSuicideMental HealthMental IllnessAnguishDepressedPrevention
Book:Darkness visible: a memoir of madness
Create image

“My brother was philosophically impaired, emotionally paralysed and stubborn, but he was not mentally ill. Mental illness suggests some kind of biological maladjustment such as that caused by injury or drug-induced chemical imbalances, whereas my brother, like many male suicides I have known, reacted normally to an abnormal situation. My brother felt he could not show the suffering that revealed him as sensitive; to do so would have threatened his gender status. It was easier for him to die.”

DeathSufferingDepressionSuicideMental IllnessToxic MasculinitySibling Suicide
Author:Antonella Gambotto-Burke
Create image

“I am sitting next to a middle-aged Midwestern blonde from Shakopee, Minnesota. She is unremarkable; from the outside she looks less unkempt than some, a veneer of solidity that makes me wonder what she's doing here. Then she tells her story. Her thirty-year-old daughter, her best friend as she described her, had planned a big fiftieth birthday party for her. She had set up catering, had had a cake delivered to her mom's house. A few hours before the party, she had been with her mom setting up tables and making a playlist, and then left to go to her apartment to change clothes. She said to her mother what she said every time they parted, "I love loving you," and walked out the door. She never showed up for the party. She had gone home and hanged herself. This mother, that veneer I had misrecognized, was a husk, all that was left of a body destroyed by the unknown becoming known. "What had I missed?" she asked. What was lurking inside the body of her daughter that day? What was underneath the party planning and the love of loving her mother? What could that young woman not bear to know, not bear to feel?”

LoveLossGriefFamilySuicideInvisibleMental IllnessInvisible IllnessInvisible Self
Book:Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition
Create image