Elyn R Saks Quotes

#1. 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.

Elyn R. Saks

#2. Some people say I'm unique, that there aren't other people with schizophrenia like me. Well, there are people like me out there, but the stigma is so great that they don't come forward.

Elyn Saks

#3. When I'm on the road making a movie in another city, on my day off, I always go to the movies. I love going to the movies. You get a ticket and sit there, and it's very interesting to be around people who aren't personally invested in you, in any way. They're just going to the movies

Christopher Walken

#4. Do not allow a gentleman to overhear you speaking about courtship, literature, or politics.

Laila Ibrahim

#5. Nothing I can do. There will be raging fires, and hundreds, maybe thousands of people lying dead in the streets. And it will all - all of it - be my fault.

Elyn R. Saks

#6. There are forces of nature and circumstance that are beyond our control, let alone our understanding, and to insist on victory in the face of this, to accept nothing less, is just asking for a soul-pummeling. The simple truth is, not every fight can be won.

Elyn R. Saks

#7. Epithets, like pepper, Give zest to what you write; And if you strew them sparely, They whet the appetite: But if you lay them on too thick, You spoil the matter quite!

Lewis Carroll

#8. No one would ever say that someone with a broken arm or a broken leg is less than a whole person, but people say that or imply that all the time about people with mental illness.

Elyn R. Saks

#9. I was afraid the staff would laugh at me - and as frightened as I was, the thought of derision frightened me even more. In retrospect, it was a life-threatening deception, somewhat along the lines of hiding recurrent chest pains from one's cardiologist from embarrassment. Nearly

Elyn R. Saks

#10. We must stop criminalizing mental illness. It's a national tragedy and scandal that the L.A. County Jail is the biggest psychiatric facility in the United States.

Elyn Saks

#11. In general the assumption of all of us, child or adult, was that this was a new country and that a new country had no history. History was something that applied to other places.

Wallace Stegner

#12. The schizophrenic mind is not so much split as shattered. I like to say schizophrenia is like a waking nightmare.

Elyn Saks

#13. Some truths that were too difficult and frightening to know.

Elyn R. Saks

#14. The humanity we all share is more important than the mental illnesses we may not

Elyn R. Saks

#15. My good fortune is not that I've recovered from mental illness. I have not, nor will I ever. My good fortune lies in having found my life.

Elyn R. Saks

#16. Everyone becomes psychotic in his or her own ways.

Elyn Saks

#17. In a way, I had a very good and normal childhood. I had loving and caring parents. But I had a lot of quirks or problems when I was growing up. I had phobias and obsessions.

Elyn Saks

#18. Wild horses wouldn't draw it from you?

Robert Louis Stevenson

#19. I am a woman with chronic schizophrenia. I have spent hundreds of days in psychiatric hospitals. I could have ended up living most of my life on a back ward, but things turned out quite differently.

Elyn Saks

#20. Your sole contribution to the sum of things is yourself.

Frank Crane

#21. Stigma against mental illness is a scourge with many faces, and the medical community wears a number of those faces.

Elyn R. Saks

#22. One of the reasons the doctors gave for hospitalizing me against my will was that I was 'gravely disabled.' To support this view, they wrote in my chart that I was unable to do my Yale Law School homework. I wondered what that meant about much of the rest of New Haven.

Elyn Saks

#23. In my experience, the words "now just calm down" almost inevitably have the opposite effect on the person you are speaking to.

Elyn R. Saks

#24. Choose your friends wisely, and also choose friends that you can trust.

Elyn Saks

#25. As a sign of utmost gratitude for his contributions to the Indian society in restoring equal rights of the citizens, I confer him (B.R. Ambedkar) the title "Martin Luther King Jr. of India.

Abhijit Naskar

#26. I have a car in Nebraska. When I bought it, they gave me a satellite radio, and there's an 'indie-rock' station. It's just nothing I'm interested in.

Conor Oberst

#27. My mind has been both my best friend and my worst enemy.

Elyn Saks

#28. Portray [people with mental illness] sympathetically, and portray them in all the richness and depth of their experience as people, and not as diagnoses.

Elyn Saks

#29. Occupying my mind with complex problems has been my best and most powerful and most reliable defense against my mental illness.

Elyn Saks

#30. All my life, books had been the life raft, the safe haven, the place I ran to when nothing else worked.

Elyn R. Saks

#31. I try to fit in workouts whenever I can.

Idris Elba

#32. Please hear this: There are not 'schizophrenics.' There are people with schizophrenia.

Elyn Saks

#33. Now whenever I watched a Star Wars film, I found myself wondering how the Empire had the technology to make long-distance holographic phone calls between planets light-years apart, and yet no one had figured out how to make a remote-controlled TIE Fighter or X-Wing yet.

Ernest Cline

#34. My son has a big Christmas problem - what do you buy for a father who has everything and you're using it?

Milton Berle

#35. A man may travel fast enough and earn his living on the road.

Henry David Thoreau

#36. There's a tremendous need to implode the myths of mental illness, to put a face on it, to show people that a diagnosis does not have to lead to a painful and oblique life ... We who struggle with these disorders can lead full, happy, productive lives, if we have the right resources.

Elyn R. Saks

#37. There should be an honored place in history for statesmen whose ideas turned out to be right.

Walter Isaacson

#38. She did not see why anyone should worry about her soul, even the people she marched with. "When it gives me trouble," she'd sneer, "I'll call y'all.

Alice Walker

#39. Don't focus on it," she said. "Don't define yourself in terms of something which even many highly trained and gifted professionals do not fully understand.

Elyn R. Saks

#40. I see but one rule: to be clear.

Stendhal

#41. My experience is that when one is in psychosis, you're on a mission and nothing is going to stop you. At some level your brain is telling you you probably shouldn't be doing this, but you're on a mission.

Elyn Saks

#42. Some people still hold [the] view that restraints help psychiatric patients feel safe. I've never met a psychiatric patient who agreed.

Elyn Saks

#43. The human brain comprises about 2 percent of a person's body weight, but it consumes upward of 20 pcent of that body's oxygen intake, and it controls 100 percent of that body's actions.

Elyn R. Saks