Quotes About Mental Health Stigma

#1. 1 in 5 people have dandruff. 1 in 4 people have mental health problems. I've had both.

Ruby Wax

#2. You are not your illness. You have an individual story to tell. You have a name, a history, a personality. Staying yourself is part of the battle.

Julian Seifter

#3. Stop shying away from people. If you actually took a moment to listen to what they have to say, they might just say something that will change your life.

S.R. Crawford

#4. 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

#5. I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly confounded.

Sylvia Plath

#6. Looking at mental health problems the same way we look at other medical problems is factually correct - the best bet for reducing the disabling symptoms and the only way to lessen the stigma and blame that traditionally double or triple the pain.

Mark Vonnegut

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. Although enlightened people know that an extreme phobia wasn't a form of madness, hey could not help but regard it as odd.

Dean Koontz

#10. Been under treatment for PTSD and bipolar since 1992. I'm not ashamed of my illness. I've been shunned by many and I feel for those shunned, too.

Stanley Victor Paskavich

#11. A panic attack is pathological exaggeration of the body's normal response to fear, stress or excitement.

Abhijit Naskar

#12. This disease comes with a package: shame. When any other part of your body gets sick, you get sympathy.

Ruby Wax

#13. Even though I know that breaking your brain is the same as breaking your arm, I'm still ashamed that my brain is broken.

A.S. King

#14. They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.

Nathaniel Lee

#15. The problem with the stigma around mental health is really about the stories that we tell ourselves as a society. What is normal? That's just a story that we tell ourselves.

Matthew Quick

#16. I think the stigma attached to mental illness will disappear just like it did for cancer years ago.

Sally Graham

#17. Officially, it is no more possible to be a little bit OCD than it is to be a little bit pregnant or a little bit dead.

David Adam

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

Elyn R. Saks

#19. In reviewing his own moral career, the stigmatized individual may single out and retrospectively elaborate experiences which serve for him to account for his coming to the beliefs and practices that he now has regarding his own kind and normals.

Erving Goffman

#20. The stigma of mental illness is first and foremost a social justice issue!

Patrick W. Corrigan

#21. Stigma's power lies in silence. The silence that persists when discussion and action should be taking place. The silence one imposes on another for speaking up on a taboo subject, branding them with a label until they are rendered mute or preferably unheard.

M.B. Dallocchio

#22. It's so common, it could be anyone. The trouble is, nobody wants to talk about it. And that makes everything worse.

Ruby Wax

#23. My therapist told me that I over-analyze everything. I explained to him that he only thinks this because of his unhappy relationship with his mother.

Michel Templet

#24. Attitudes to mental health are slowly changing, there's less stigma among healthcare workers and a greater commitment to provide mental health treatment when doctors and nurses can see people do get better.

Reggie Fils-Aime

#25. 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

#26. People should know about us. Girls who write their pain on their bodies. ~Louisa

Kathleen Glasgow

#27. What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candor, more unashamed conversation about illnesses that affect not only individuals, but their families as well.

Glenn Close

#28. 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

#29. To resist a compulsion with willpower alone is to hold back an avalanche by melting the snow with a candle. It just keeps coming and coming and coming.

David Adam

#30. Stigmas speak to the idea of difference and how difference shames us and those we know.

Michael Lewis

#31. While a psychiatric diagnosis can serve a purpose in treatment plans, it should not become a tool to discredit a person's disclosure of abuse.

Lee Ann Hoff

#32. The drug I take is called schizophrenia, among other labels, which I desperately want to put away. I want to put the drug of schizophrenia down, and I want to put down the stigma surrounding its label.

Jonathan Harnisch

#33. 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

#34. Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, but stigma and bias shame us all.

Bill Clinton

#35. 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

#36. Resistance to change in the mental health system comes disguised as protection of civil liberties and freedom of speech. As a result, many parents, families, and caregivers are at a loss and feel defeated by the majority of Americans who strive to maintain the current rules of society.

Tamara Hill

#37. Unfortunately, mental health is so misunderstood that some people think you have to be crazy to need to speak to a therapist.

Nicole Curtis

#38. Mental health treatment is most likely available to the officers, but they may be reluctant to access it due to cultural beliefs within the force, fear of stigma, etc.

Brian Lindstrom

#39. Self-stigma refers to the state in which a person with mental illness has come to internalize the negative attitudes about mental illness and turns them against him- or herself.

Patrick W. Corrigan