Top 100 People Mental Illness Quotes
#1. Many people say that psychiatrists just want to push drugs. Well I seriously have to say, without medication, I'd be locked up in a VA hospital somewhere.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#2. We share in the certainty that people labeled with mental illness are first and above all, human beings. Our lives are precious and are of infinite value.
Patricia Deegan
#3. Wanting to be on television is a mental illness. Wanting to be president of the United States, wanting to be an actor - these are degrees of the same mental illness. If you need to be approved of simultaneously by more people than are in this room now, there's a problem.
Keith Olbermann
#4. This isn't normal. This isn't how normal people think.
Fuck off, world- what the hell is normal anyway?
Elizabeth Haynes
#5. Certain empty houses that seemed to stare like the faces of people suffering from terrible mental illness. An empty barn on the outskirts of town, the hayloft door swinging open and closed on rusty hinges, first disclosing darkness, then hiding it, then disclosing it again.
Stephen King
#6. DID is about survival! As more people begin to appreciate this concept, individuals with DID will start to feel less as though they have to hide in shame. DID develops as a response to extreme trauma that occurs at an early age and usually over an extended period of time.
Deborah Bray Haddock
#7. I think that people do things for a reason - that we have mental illness, that we have genetic wiring that can get triggered by certain environmental factors.
Karin Slaughter
#8. I do not have a split mind. I am not different people. I am myself, the same self I have always been, the one person I can never escape.
Nathan Filer
#9. Most people can only sleep with a nice soft pillow I can only sleep with heavy anti psychotics
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#10. To some extent, sanity is a form of conformity. People are always selling the idea that people who have mental illness are suffering. But it's really not so simple. I think mental illness or madness can be an escape also.
John F. Nash
#11. Over and over again in my life, I find closeness to other people and proximity to other people really painful; that's part of my mental illness, social anxiety. Closeness to other people is really hard, but it's also a shame because it's all you want too. But it doesn't always work.
Adam Duritz
#12. I think people don't understand how intimately tied suicide is to mental illness, particularly to depressive illness and bipolar illness.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#13. One in four of us will have a mental illness at some point. That is a lot of people.
Alastair Campbell
#14. 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
#15. People with BPD are like people with third degree burns over 90% of their bodies. Lacking emotional skin, they feel agony at the slightest touch or movement.
Marsha M. Linehan
#16. People with developmental disabilities and mental illness are only handicapped by how much we underestimate them.
Donna Kirk
#17. Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.
Richard Dawkins
#18. Those that have lost their lives to suicide were good people, who were in deep, deep pain. Keep speaking about mental illness and keep it out of the darkness.
Mariel Hemingway
#19. Treatment for people with disabilities and mental illness in prewar America reveals a profoundly ignorant medical establishment and educational community.
Kate Clifford Larson
#20. People with mental health problems are almost never dangerous. In fact, they are more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators. At the same time, mental illness has been the common denominator in one act of mass violence after another.
Roy Blunt
#21. 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
#22. Unfortunately, mental health is so misunderstood that some people think you have to be crazy to need to speak to a therapist.
Nicole Curtis
#23. The mentally ill frighten and embarrass us. And so we marginalize the people who most need our acceptance. What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candor, more unashamed conversation.
Glenn Close
#24. The concept of recovery is rooted in the simple yet profound realization that people who have been diagnosed with mental illness are human beings.
Patricia Deegan
#25. I wasn't sure if it was safe for me to be sharing time and space with other people, who all seemed so much gentler and safer and less of a secret to themselves than I felt I was.
Catherine Lacey
#26. 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.
S.R. Crawford
#27. An inner ease spreads inside me. Such is the power of acceptance and understanding from other people, the power of validation
Kiera Van Gelder
#28. 1 in 5 people have dandruff. 1 in 4 people have mental health problems. I've had both.
Ruby Wax
#29. If a person refuses to develop his potential, it can lead to nervous or mental disorders, somatic diseases and personal degradation
Sunday Adelaja
#30. It's really kind of overwhelming and staggering to me how many people I know that have mental illness and there's not one thing that works. You just have to go on your search. It's like a journey of, "How am I gonna get well?"
Maya Forbes
#31. Incredible shame is associated with mental illness. People will confide the most intimate details of their love life before they'll mention a relative who had a serious mental breakdown. But the brain is just another organ. It's just a machine, and a machine can go wrong.
Candace B. Pert
#32. People are always selling the idea that people with mental illness are suffering. I think madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better.
John Forbes Nash Jr.
#33. After college, I went through my own shit and decided that all physical suffering in the world couldn't compare to mental anguish. And when I got myself, I decided to help other people.
Ned Vizzini
#34. The vast majority of people who have mental illness problems never hurt anybody.
Penn Jillette
#35. But what if I did tell people exactly what was going on? What if I valued my own peace of mind more than what other people think of me? Would I end up jobless, friendless, and loveless? Would I vanish entirely?
Melissa Broder
#36. I was hoping that I could say stuff about mental illness that maybe people didn't know. You know, speak up for bipolar disorder and let people know a little bit more about it that they may not have known.
Eric Millegan
#37. I know exactly what he means. I had overheard Poirot talking to my parents. He was using words like "psychosis" and "schizophrenic". Words that people feel they have to whisper, or not repeat at all. The Mental-Illness-That-Must-Not-Be-Named.
Neal Shusterman
#38. But new love only lasts so long, and then you crash back into the real people you are, and from as high as we were, it's a very long fall, and we hit the ground with a thud.
Marya Hornbacher
#39. People accuse me of glamorizing mental illness. Looking back sometimes, that's true. But I don't feel guilty.
Andy Behrman
#40. self-stigma is not a person's fault; nor is it a part of the person's illness!
If the public did not hold negative and stigmatizing attitudes in the first place, these would never have become internalized, causing people the painful and disabling experience of self-stigma.
Patrick W. Corrigan
#41. People who continue in blatant sin whilst exercising spiritual gifts create this ever widening gulf in their personality which results in spiritual failure, emotional collapse, sometimes mental breakdown, physical illness, relational difficulties and quite often a complete moral lapse.
Graham Cooke
#42. Maybe I am losing it. They say a big sign of mental illness is not knowing you have it. But isn't it real insanity to go through the world ignoring people in front of you? All your friends were strangers before they became friends. I sneak glances at the darling strangers on the subway.
Dakota Lane
#43. 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
#44. There will always be people afraid of the monsters in the night. They are usually the ones that look for them because they have proven they exist in themselves.
Shannon L. Alder
#45. I wonder if there is anyone who is not depraved. A wearisome thought.
I want money. Unless I have it ...
In my sleep, a natural death!
Osamu Dazai
#46. Mental illness didn't really change people. It just made them more of who they were going to be anyway. Mental illness was less like obliteration, more like italics.
Heather Sellers
#48. The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four people is suffering from a mental illness. Look at your 3 best friends. If they're ok, then it's you.
Rita Mae Brown
#49. That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
Erich Fromm
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. It sure is boring to be around people who are in character all the time. I always find it's closer to mental illness than acting excellence.
William H. Macy
#53. Mental health is usually the last place people go when they think about someone being sick.
Louise Gornall
#54. I think that basically we are all helping people. All the time. Every time any of us speaks openly about mental health, we are helping normalize an illness that is still handled with protective goggles and safety gloves.
Matt Haig
#55. There is a dead space between most people and those afflicted with Mental Illness and it's called Understanding
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#56. People with OCD including myself, realize that their seemingly uncontrollable behavior is irrational, but they feel unable to stop it.
Abhijit Naskar
#57. I didn't have the luxury of taking reality for granted. And I wouldn't say I hated people who did, because that's just about everyone. I didn't hate them. They didn't live in my world.
But that never stopped me from wishing I lived in theirs.
Francesca Zappia
#58. The people I know who suffer from mental illness, sometimes they do connect you to what it is to be really human. There's a vulnerability there, there's something very potent.
Maya Forbes
#59. 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
#60. The disturbed individual who believes himself to be Christ, or to receive messages from God, is something of a cliche in our society. Ever since Sigmund Freud, many people have associated religiosity with neurosis and mental illness.
Robert Winston
#61. Unlike 'mere' medical or physical disorders, mental disorders are not just problems. If successfully navigated, they can also present opportunities. Simply acknowledging this can empower people to heal themselves and, much more than that, to grow from their experiences.
Neel Burton
#62. 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
#63. Many people with Dissociative Disorders are very creative and used their creative capacities to help them cope with childhood trauma.p55
Marlene Steinberg
#64. 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
#65. As no one knew much about my mental illness, a lot of people had the attitude that I had the capability to 'kick it' and get better instantly. This was the most frustrating attitude for me.
Andy Behrman
#66. There was a time when I was way too reliant upon other people's opinions and perspective of me. And I guess over time came to see how unhealthy that was. I mean it's almost like a sign of mental illness to base your self-worth on the opinions of complete strangers.
Moby
#67. It's frustrating when our best efforts to help people fail. But if we could see life through their weary eyes and experience their trials with the same frayed emotions, we might understand why.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#68. 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
#69. The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.
David Foster Wallace
#70. Owing to a poorly defined sense of self, people with BPD rely on others for their feelings of worth and emotional caretaking. So fearful are they of feeling alone that they may act in desperate ways that quite frequently bring about the very abandonment and rejection they're trying to avoid.
Kimberlee Roth
#71. Sensitive people usually love deeply and hate deeply. They don't know any other way to live than by extremes because thier emotional theromastat is broken.
Shannon L. Alder
#72. I have learned that every person in the world is on the spectrum of mental illness. Many people barely register on the scale, while others have far more than they could be expected to handle.
Jenny Lawson
#73. People can't listen until they're ready. I sure couldn't. I was, like, deaf to everyone except the thoughts. They were the boss of me.
Teresa Toten
#74. Severe mental illness like psychosis can lead to a tragedy like this - that people can see things that aren't real and hear things that aren't real and believe things that aren't real, and act in that distorted reality.
Andrea Yates
#75. I think Hell exists on Earth. It's a psychological state, or it can be a physical state. People who have severe mental illness are in Hell. People who have lost a loved one are in Hell. I think there are all kinds of different hells. It's not a place you go to after you die.
Al Franken
#76. To be lonely is to feel unwanted and unloved, and therefor unloveable. Loneliness is a taste of death. No wonder some people who are desperately lonely lose themselves in mental illness or violence to forget the inner pain.
Jean Vanier
#77. 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.
Rob Delaney
#78. 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
#79. When you read my poems or quotes remember you're stepping into the mind that steps outside of me
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#80. Mental illness turns people inwards. That's what I reckon. It keeps up forever trapped by the pain of our own minds, in the same way that the pain of a broken leg or a cut thumb will grab your attention, holding it so tightly that your good leg or your good thumb seem to cease to exist.
Nathan Filer
#81. 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
#82. And people get so weird about mental illness, you follow the rules! You don't up a heart patient on a roller coaster, you don't put a mental patient on a hunting trip with you!
Christopher Titus
#83. People who have certain types of mental illness have different wiring in their brain. And part of that having a different kind of wiring so to speak could in some sense be related to having a different way of thinking which could produce genius type thoughts.
H. A. Berlin
#84. Yes, this is 21st-century America. Where we have better means to treat mental illness than ever before, but choose to let the insane people decide to get it or not.
Rich Lowry
#85. Children whose parents return to study do much better at school. Offenders who persist with studies are much less likely to reoffend. The national mental health strategy recognises the important role adult learning can play for people recovering from mental illness.
David Blunkett
#86. Stigmas speak to the idea of difference and how difference shames us and those we know.
Michael Lewis
#87. People hear the words mental illness and immediately think crazy. But he's not crazy, and there's no reason you can't have a happy and positive relationship like anyone else." "You
Nicola Haken
#88. You have to hide what you are and it's really stressful and very bad for your self esteem. Because it's not obvious to people that you are ill, they treat you as if you're a pain in the ass, then you beat yourself up and you are already beating yourself up as a part of mental illness.
Sinead O'Connor
#89. It takes all my strength to do daily tasks. To some people, I'm just a number. I'm a projected food stamps debit card lifetime member. I'm seen as crazy or insane, but it doesn't matter. I know I am bigger than my suffering.
Jacquelyn Nicole Davis
#90. I think that most of us instinctively avoid people with mental illness.
Brian Lindstrom
#91. Diagnoses exist to help get people services they need - but there's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill.
John Darnielle
#92. It just begged the question: If it took so long for one of the best hospitals in the world to get to this step, how many other people were going untreated, diagnosed with a mental illness or condemned to a life in a nursing home or a psychiatric ward?
Susannah Cahalan
#93. In the 1830s, Dorothea Dix revolutionized the care of people with mental illness by taking them out of jails and caring for them in asylums, later known as state hospitals.
Thomas R. Insel
#94. He wondered at the atrocities human kind was capable of committing. The majority of those housed below were ill, mentally or physically, not witches. Most were poor victims
the outcasts of society; or the opposite, people so blessed, others coveted their lives.
Brynn Chapman
#95. So, because I have a mental illness I should disappear and hide? Ever since I went into hospital, all I have heard and read about is people telling me what they think I should do.
Charlotte Dawson
#96. 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
#97. For all the normal people who make fun of the mentally ill it's spelled K.A.R.M.A. and it's pronounced your days coming, Bitch!
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#98. What if you had such severe schizophrenia that your life was just one hallucination after another? And what if people kept trying to drag you back out of those hallucinations, to prove that you weren't living in reality and that reality was nothing more than a psych hospital? Would you go?
Jonathan Harnisch
#99. In talking with people that have experienced it, I learned that PTSD is something that a person in a position of authority sometimes thinks they're not supposed to have. They don't always have an avenue to personally address it or even discuss it.
Stana Katic
#100. If you expand the boundaries of mental illness, which is clealry what has happened in this country during the past twenty-five years, and you treat the people so diagnosed with psychiatric medications, do you run the risk of turning an anger-ridden teenager into a lifelong mental patient? (p. 30)
Robert Whitaker
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