Top 100 Quotes About Mental Illness
#1. I don't like psychiatrists," Alecto told her. "Not because they don't think I'm real, but because they have no idea what they're doing.
Rebecca McNutt
#2. Grief is NOT a mental illness or an emotional disorder. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never experienced it for themselves.
Rebecca McNutt
#3. You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#4. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. As well as being blind, Ma turned out to have the same mental illness that her mother had had. Between 1986 and 1990, she suffered six schizophrenic bouts, each requiring her to be institutionalised for up to three months.
Liz Murray
#9. Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae.
Camille Paglia
#10. 15 Step is about how if you have mental illness and try to dance you look very funny. Whenever you see me dancing on stage, I'm imitating the mentally ill.
Thom Yorke
#11. 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
#12. What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.
Sylvia Plath
#13. 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
#14. While obsession with one's personal appearance is a sign of being a vacant prat, total oblivion to it is a sign of mental illness.
Kate Cann
#15. The neurologist had dismissed her case after a single visit, handing out an easy nostrum by telling her father that if she continued to write poetry, she would be all right.
Flora Rheta Schreiber
#16. 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
#17. Neurosis is an inner cleavage-the state of being at war with oneself.
Carl Jung
#18. 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
#19. As smart as I am, it took a boy stuck in his house to teach me that sometimes it doesn't matter where you are at all. It only matters whos with you.
John Corey Whaley
#20. 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
#21. My dad believes that bad disguises itself - that danger hides. I think it's the opposite. The truly horrible things about the world are always reaching out for you.
Brian James
#22. Because I'm not, in fact, depressed, Prozac makes me manic and numb - one of the reasons I slice my arm in the first place is that I'm coked to the gills on something utterly wrong for what I have.
Marya Hornbacher
#23. 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
#24. Disability has become a form of permanent welfare for a lot of folks. It's not that hard to prove a mental illness or mental issues or pain issues.
Nina Easton
#25. Bipolar is an illness not a hopeless destination it can be maintained with proper medication
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#26. Let's pretend you are capable of being who I think I need you to be: a love story.
Melissa Broder
#27. He tried to sleep, but his head was filled with the faces of lunatics, their palsied hands, their shattered eyes.
Sebastian Faulks
#28. The brave men and women, who serve their country and as a result, live constantly with the war inside them, exist in a world of chaos. But the turmoil they experience isn't who they are; the PTSD invades their minds and bodies.
Robert Koger
#29. Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.
Joseph Conrad
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#34. I'm afraid to see a psychiatrist about the voices in my head. She might know who they are.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#35. 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
#36. It's so common, it could be anyone. The trouble is, nobody wants to talk about it. And that makes everything worse.
Ruby Wax
#37. There are such things as delusions, but not every unlikely vision that the mentally ill have is imaginary.
Shepherd Hoodwin
#38. 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
#39. As much as possible, and this as quickly as possible: that is what the great mental and emotional illness craves that is variously called "present" or "culture," but that is actually a symptom of consumption.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#40. The mind commands the mind to will, and yet, though it be itself, it minds not. What is this monstrous thing? And why is it?
Saint Augustine
#41. The very use of the term "mental illness" (rather than, say, "neurosis", "insanity", "nervous breakdown", or other euphemisms) can be seen as an effort to move certain kinds of psychological distress into the biomedical realm.
Carl Elliott
#42. I graciously survived depression, mental-illness and attempt of suicide.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#43. Panic attacks are a lot like being drunk in some ways, you lose self-control. You cry for seemingly no reason. You deal with the hangover long into the next day.
Sara Barnard
#45. If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.
Socrates
#46. Oh! This'll impress you - I'm actually in the Abnormal Psychology textbook. Obviously my family is so proud. Keep in mind though, I'm a PEZ dispenser and I'm in the abnormal Psychology textbook. Who says you can't have it all?
Carrie Fisher
#47. But even then I knew it wasn't me that saved her life. It wasn't about me. I was just there while she was maybe going to die and maybe not, and then she just didn't.
Lucy Corin
#48. Depression is real. It happens. We go through it. Hold onto yourself in those moments.
Avijeet Das
#49. 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
#50. I knew you were in charge of me but my mind broke on its own.
Alice Notley
#51. She was now drowning in that pool of desires without having any idea about the depth of it.
Viraj J. Mahajan
#52. In an ideal world, it would not take a film star to get the media focused on mental illness.
Alastair Campbell
#53. If this was mental illness, or even just a particularly clinical case of adolescence, I was bearing up pretty well.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#54. 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
#55. I felt held hostage by her illness and by the backward mental health system that once again was incapable of helping our family in crisis.
Mira Bartok
#56. The fatal weakness of most psychiatric historiographies lies in the historians' failure to give sufficient weight to the role of coercion in psychiatry and to acknowledge that mad-doctoring had nothing to do with healing.
Thomas Szasz
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. If we are to believe the evidence from clinical trials there are many effective pharmacological and psychological treatments for mental illness. Epidemiological data, on the other hand, says otherwise.
Richard Bentall
#60. Over the years, I have been a house painter, farm worker, paste-up artist, Easter Bunny, pizza delivery person, homeless shelter staff member, and counselor for adults and kids with mental illness - I quit my last real job in 2000 to work on writing full-time.
Jennifer McMahon
#61. 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
#62. 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
#64. I found my way home, stripped naked, and lay on the bathroom floor, the cool tiles pushing up. Keeping me from falling. I didn't know how long the floor would hold me. I prayed Ellen would come home ...
Juliann Garey
#65. Another of the difficulties of having DID is the denial. DID is a disorder of denial. It has to be because if the original person knew about the alters and felt their pain, they would either go crazy and be hospitalized permanently, or would die.
Eve N. Adams
#66. We all feel inadequate very often. It's only when it gets chronic that it is disturbing to one's emotions and can get out of hand and make you pretty damn miserable.
Taylor Caldwell
#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. My painful memories sift through me like sand through stretched fingers. Only small pieces cling and stay around for me to keep, the rest just disappear. I know not where and I don't
Willow Madison
#69. During my mental illness, thank God, my grandma was my human rescuer and angel, she ask me to stop taking the medication, leading to the recovering.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#70. Mental illness leaves a huge legacy, not just for the person suffering it but for those around them.
Lysette Anthony
#71. The medication given during mental-ill health makes you rather weaker in body, in soul and in spirit.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#72. 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
#73. After a couple of somehow frightening evenings over the course of which each of us was, there can be little doubt, impressed more and more powerfully by the mental illness of the other, we restricted our friendship to the stairs.
Joseph O'Neill
#75. There is no such thing as mental illness, hence also no such thing as psychotherapy.
Thomas Szasz
#76. There is a very fine line between hobby and mental illness.
Dave Barry
#77. Want to do something noble and courageous while you're on this Earth treat the mentally ill like they have some worth.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#78. What will life be like without her? I am dreadfully sad she is leaving. What if she just disappears; gets tired of all this trouble at home? What if she leaves me too? How heavy is a dresser when you're the only one pushing it against the door? I feel truly on my own.
Mira Bartok
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. I went through a very lethargic period ... I was just sort of getting through every night and every day.
Patty Duke
#83. I'm tired of having such a happy, perfect life. And that can only be a sign of mental illness. That's what I fall asleep thinking. Perhaps I really do have a serious problem.
Paulo Coelho
#84. Though my mental illness is more likened to a big, nasty green monster than something heart-wrenchingly beautiful, I think I have learned many wonderful lessons from my many afflictions.
Jacquelyn Nicole Davis
#85. Sometimes the world is so much sicker than the inmates of its institutions.
Joanne Greenberg
#87. With mental illness the trick is to not take your feelings so seriously; you're zooming in and zooming away from things that go from being too important to being not important at all.
Mark Vonnegut
#88. There are two kinds of 'disabled' persons: Those who dwell on what they have lost and those who concentrate on what they have left.
Thomas Szasz
#89. Depression is our way of telling ourselves that something is seriously wrong and needs working through and changing.
Neel Burton
#90. One of the things psychologists used to say was that if you are depressed, anxious or angry, you couldn't be happy. Those were at opposite ends of a continuum. I believe that you can be suffering or have a mental illness and be happy - just not in the same moment that you're sad.
Martin Seligman
#91. Many people with Dissociative Disorders are very creative and used their creative capacities to help them cope with childhood trauma.p55
Marlene Steinberg
#92. Tradition is a kind of mental illness with a clear symptom of repetition
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#93. 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
#94. It's almost like a sign of mental illness to base your self-worth on the opinions of complete strangers, you know?
Moby
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. ... nostalgia was once thought to be a mental illness or a physical affliction; for me, it was both.
Laura McHugh
#98. 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
#99. Mental illness is the last frontier. The gay thing is part of everyday life now on a show like 'Modern Family,' but mental illness is still full of stigma. Maybe it is time for that to change.
Eric McCormack
#100. You say I resemble a flower; I partly agree; My brain is governed by black petals of burnt daisies
Anne Sexton
