Top 100 Depression Mental Illness Quotes
#1. Like many self-help books, The Deepest Blue is full of horrifyingly simplistic language and some admittedly good advice. Somehow the women in the book learn to say: That's my depression talking. It's not "me."
As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.
Maggie Nelson
#2. 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.
William Styron
#3. I am growing to hate the vague declarations of psychiatric treatment, the airy cross-your-fingers pronouncements. The treatment of mental health is an inexact science. But, as I am slowly coming to understand, depression is an inexact illness.
Sally Brampton
#4. It wasn't that she was sad - sadness had very little to do with it, really, considering that most of the time, she felt close to nothing at all. Feeling required nerves, connections, sensory input. The only thing she felt was numb. And tired. Yes, she very frequently felt tired.
Nenia Campbell
#5. The depressed person is mired in the past; the manic person is obsessed with the future. Both destroy the present in the process.
S. Nassir Ghaemi
#6. It's so common, it could be anyone. The trouble is, nobody wants to talk about it. And that makes everything worse.
Ruby Wax
#7. I graciously survived depression, mental-illness and attempt of suicide.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#8. Depression is real. It happens. We go through it. Hold onto yourself in those moments.
Avijeet Das
#9. People with mental illnesses aren't wrapped up in themselves because they are intrinsically any more selfish than other people. Of course not. They are just feeling things that can't be ignored. Things that point the arrows inward.
Matt Haig
#10. Some of us will experience some form of mental illness in their lifetime... I rather have depression that can be treated with a pill and my free will to conquer it; than have a physical illness that results in my demise because no matter what I did I could not conquer it.
Brian Michael Good
#11. Have I gone mad like Anne and no one has the heart to tell me? I wish someone would tell me, I feel crazy enough though.
Suzanne Collins
#12. I've got to that point in life when there's very few thrills and lots of pills seems we all end up this way. As we wait for our final day. But there's one thing about the pills I take. My manic episodes have taken a break
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#13. Prideful fool. It hurt his feelings that he couldn't make my crazy go away. You know how men are. Always trying to fix things can't be fixed.
Ken Wheaton
#14. Too often the mentally ill are marginalized as people who just can't pull up their socks. If only it were that simple.
Suzanne F. Kingsmill
#15. Depression is our way of telling ourselves that something is seriously wrong and needs working through and changing.
Neel Burton
#16. After being hurt by the world so much, they began to see the demons within humans. So without hiding it through trickery, they worked to express it.
Osamu Dazai
#17. My pillow is as good as any ocean
to drown in the nightmare of myself.
I swam all the way here from the moon.
Casey Renee Kiser
#18. We dig holes for ourselves, of comfortable living, and it's hard to see just how deep down you are until you suddenly want to take a look at the world up there, some fresh air
and realise you can't get up. You're too far down.
Charlotte Eriksson
#20. What to do with life? Get out of bed, Derek. That's what you do. You get out of bed, and you get yourself a cup of fucking coffee. That's all you can do.
Allie Burke
#22. The first time I saw her,
Everything in my head went quiet.
Neil Hilborn
#24. I've really been grappling with depression. It's all linked with my cocaine and ecstasy abuse.
Robbie Williams
#25. Light existed all along. Of course it did. Who says it didn't because I couldn't see it?
Gillian Marchenko
#26. Depression: the healthy suspicion that modern life has no meaning and that modern society is absurd and alienating.
Neel Burton
#27. I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds.
Hugo Wolf
#28. He had the feeling that there was something physically behind his eyes, blocking the light.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#29. Since the Second World War, rates of common mental illness (depression and anxiety) have been increasing in the industrialized nations, whereas rates of recovery from severe mental illness have not improved despite the availability of apparently effective therapies such as antipsychotic drugs.
Richard Bentall
#30. Uncommon anxiety came to us in common hours when other people were doing mundane things like taking out the trash or checking their phones. But there was nothing to be done for this. We couldn't change who we were or what had happened.
Laura Anderson Kurk
#32. Mental illness is not in the business of making sense of itself.
Roni Askey-Doran
#34. She had not been herself for weeks, yet no one noticed. She knew this feeling, it creeps up like sliding slowly into the darkness. Some days she clung on, other days she let herself slip further.
Tina J. Richardson
#35. Regret is a painful thing. Few people understand that there are three important things that leave us and can never return. Words. Time. Opportunity. These are things we can never get back.
Kathryn Perez
#36. It is possible for even the most deeply disturbed and desperately unbalanced among us to be a beautiful person.
George Howe Colt
#37. Anyone who has actually been that sad can tell you that there's nothing beautiful or literary or mysterious about depression.
Jasmine Warga
#38. I wanted to be dead. No. That's not quite right. I didn't want to be dead, I just didn't want to be alive.
Matt Haig
#39. Even now it comes as a shock if by chance I notice in the street a face resembling someone I know however slightly, and I am at once seized by a shivering violent enough to make me dizzy.
Osamu Dazai
#40. Maybe I'm needy, neurotic, paranoid. Under the circumstances, of course, if I weren't needy, neurotic, and paranoid, I'd obviously be psychotic.
Dean Koontz
#41. When had I stopped being a person with Paranoid Schizophrenia, and become a Paranoid Schizophrenic; defined by my illness?
Michaela Haze
#42. And I was incapable of living all by myself in those lodgings where I didn't know a soul. It terrified me to sit by myself quietly in my room. I felt frightened, as if I might be set upon or struck by someone at any moment.
Osamu Dazai
#43. And this was something I would always wonder about - how the lines were drawn to define mental illness. When did a little depression become pathological? When did anxiety turn into something bigger, something greater and more cautionary about your own stability?
Kate Axelrod
#44. I wonder if that's how darkness wins, by convincing us to trap it inside ourselves, instead of emptying it out.
I don't want it to win.
Jasmine Warga
#45. What is society but an individual? [ ... ] The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This was how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror at the illusion of the ocean called the world.
Osamu Dazai
#46. Preaching a man a sermon with a broken head and telling him to be right with God is equal to telling a man with a broken leg to get up and run a race.
Richard Baxter
#48. There's nothing worse than bottling something up inside and letting it eat at you. It's like being shot, and leaving the bullet inside our bodies. The wound would never heal. Instead, we need to let it out.
S.R. Crawford
#49. I think one thing is that anybody who's had to contend with mental illness - whether it's depression, bipolar illness or severe anxiety, whatever - actually has a fair amount of resilience in the sense that they've had to deal with suffering already, personal suffering.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#50. Waking up breaks my heart.
Getting dressed breaks my arms.
Joining the crowd breaks my legs.
Letting someone in ... does me in.
Casey Renee Kiser
#51. Guidance counselors always love to say, 'Just think positively,' but that's impossible when you have this thing inside of you, strangling every ounce of happiness you can muster. My body is an efficient happy-though-killing machine.
Jasmine Warga
#52. My heart is sinking and my chest physically aches from the heavy sadness that it carries within.
Shannon Perry
#53. It's good to know that if I behave strangely enough, society will take full responsibility for me.
Ashleigh Brilliant
#54. When it comes to mental illness most of the diagnoses are similar or the same yet they can never display how we individually go through our pain.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#55. I have to keep reminding myself
this is not me. It is chemistry. It is biology. It is not who I am.
David Levithan
#56. Maybe I'm a bit of a psycho-but I'd rather be psycho than boring.
Julie Delpy
#57. If you put the wrong foods in your body, you are contaminated and dirty and your stomach swells. Then the voice says, Why did you do that? Don't you know better? Ugly and wicked, you are disgusting to me.
Bethany Pierce
#58. You can talk about depression as a "chemical imbalance" all you want, but it presents itself as an external antagonist - a "demon," a "beast," or a "black dog," as Samuel Johnson called it. It could pounce at any time, even in the most innocuous setting.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#59. So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me.
Herman Melville
#60. It's horrible, horrible, horrible. It took a year and a half until I found out that I had post-natal depression.
Gail Porter
#61. The soul is innocent and immortal, it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse.
Allen Ginsberg
#62. A Depressive?'
'Smiles in ballrooms, weeps in bedrooms. Ill in her head.' Olive tapped her temple. 'And here.' She touched her heart.
Jessie Burton
#63. The one thing that we need to escape is our minds, but our minds are the one thing that we cannot escape from.
Anonymous
#64. Some people think that mental illness is a matter of mood, a matter of personality. They think depression is simply a form of being sad, that OCD is a form of being uptight. They think the soul is sick, not the body. It is, they believe, something you have choice over.
David Levithan
#65. This will sound strange, and yet I'm sure it was the point: it was a bit like being high. That, for me, anyway, had always been the attraction of drugs, to stop the brutal round of hypercritical thinking, to escape the ravages of an unoccupied mind cannibalizing itself.
Norah Vincent
#66. Bipolar illness, manic depression, manic-depressive illness, manic-depressive psychosis. That's a nice way of saying you will feel so high that no street drug can compete and you will feel so low that you wish you had been hit by a Mack truck instead.
Christine F. Anderson
#67. Smiles are a funny thing
and laughter is hilarious.
I smile sometimes
when I am delirious.
Casey Renee Kiser
#68. Being depressed and suicidal doesn't mean wanting to kill yourself every moment of every day. It may be a fixed obsession, but sometimes it gets relegated to the back of your head. Rather, it means the world takes on the very cut and dry, black and white, unilateral aspect of a flowchart.
Nenia Campbell
#69. The word "depressed" is spoken phonetically as "deep rest". We can view depression not as a mental illness, but on a deeper level, as a profound, and very misunderstood, state of deep rest, entered into when we are completely exhausted by the weight of our own identity.
Jeff Foster
#70. That is what madness is, isn't it? All the wheels fly off the bus and things don't make sense any more. Or rather, they do, but it's not a kind of sense anyone else can understand.
Audrey Niffenegger
#71. Some of the very greatest gifts bring an inevitable downside which you cannot "cure" without curing the gift at the same time.
Stephanie S. Tolan
#72. You know those drugstore kits that tell you when you're pregnant? They should have one that tells you when you're sane.
Kristin Scott Thomas
#73. It was the face of a human being who'd been constructed exclusively of wounds. Not time or history or ambition, nothing but wounds. The face of a person who could probably kill someone without feeling anything whatsoever.
Ryu Murakami
#74. Show me what you've written, I said, although I wanted desperately to avoid looking at it.
Osamu Dazai
#75. No one wants to admit that they suffer from a mental illness, because of the stigma," I said. "Both of us suffer from major depression. He knows that I've been through a lot of the same things that he's going through now.
Patrick J. Kennedy
#76. I needed some space to lay myself out, so that I could decide which pieces I wanted to pick up.
Fennel Hudson
#77. I keep wanting to crawl back into the womb ...
Sylvia Plath
#78. I cling to nowhere until I fall - the crash of Nothing ...
Emily Dickinson
#79. The words on the pages within this book are solely dedicated to victims of bullying, those that ever have or still do suffer from depression, mental illness, and the struggles that accompany it. You are brave. You are strong. You are smart. You are beautiful. You are worth it.
Kathryn Perez
#80. I now know for certain that my mind and emotions, my fix on the real and my family's well-being, depend on just a few grams of salt. But treatment's the easy part. Without honesty, without a true family reckoning, that salt's next to worthless.
David Lovelace
#81. He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost.
Osamu Dazai
#82. It was an oddly satisfying idea to feel bereft as I left my mother this time. We only feel bereft when we're deprived of something meaningful.
Laura Anderson Kurk
#83. With a damp palm, I turned the knob and cracked open the door. She was asleep in her freshly made bed. I can't explain how relieved I felt for this simple mercy. She was here and safe on clean sheets.
Laura Anderson Kurk
#85. You're surrounded by people and voices and noises, but there you are, alone and trembling inside. And you want to be invisible. (thinking) Please, don't notice me.
Kellie Elmore
#86. You are a warrior in a dark forest, with no compass and are unable to tell who the actual enemy is, So you never feel safe ..
Anonymous
#87. Watching me, judging me, smelling the crippling failure oozing from my skin, my desperation clawing and all-consuming panic drenching me as I gape in horror at the world and wonder why everyone is smiling and looking at me with secret knowledge of my aching shame.
Sarah Kane
#88. Depression in its major stages possesses no quickly available remedy: failure of alleviation is one of the most distressing factors of the disorder as it reveals itself to the victim, and one that helps situate it squarely in the category of grave diseases.
William Styron
#89. I do not crave anyone that will fix me. Just someone who will hold my hand while I fix myself.
Unknown
#90. As I accept the flowers, I release my grip on the balloons, and they bounce gently against the ceiling the way they did before - hovering, annoyed, frustrated, contained by the ceiling and disappointed by the limits of life.
Shannon Mullen
#91. Sleeping is much safer than the nightmare I'm living.
When I sleep I feel nothing and I do nothing and I see nothing and nothing matters and no one cares. There's no one to hurt or disappoint or notice when I'm low and I don't need to face anyone not anyone in the world or not even myself.
Shannon Mullen
#93. That was the crux. You. Only you could work on you. Nobody could force you, and if you weren't ready, then you weren't ready, and no amount of open-armed encouragement was going to change that.
Norah Vincent
#94. When you have mental illness it's common to be shunned by your family or friends it wouldn't happen if they knew the pain you were in.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#96. My brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.
William Styron
#97. Who am I fooling? Bad dreams never end. We just pretend they aren't there.
Shannon Mullen
#99. Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, finds it very difficult to see it as illness, rather than being willful, angry, irrational or simply tiresome.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#100. The world's religions, for all their parochialism, did supply a kind of consolation for this great ache ... This shattering recognition of our mortality is at the root of far more mental illness than I suspect even psychiatrists are aware.
Stanley Kubrick
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