Top 100 Quotes About Mental Illness
#1. I have come to realize that an early symptom of approaching mental illness is the belief that one's work is terribly important. If you consider your work very important you should take a day off.
Bertrand Russell
#2. Moreover, the genuine lover always respects and even encourages this separateness and the unique individuality of the beloved. Failure to perceive and respect this separateness is extremely common, however, and the cause of much mental illness and unnecessary suffering.
M. Scott Peck
#3. I didn't know a damned thing about mental illness and neither did anyone around me.
George McGovern
#4. My three obsessions are mental illness, horror and religion.
Victor LaValle
#5. Whether it's someone struggling with mental illness, someone struggling with poverty or struggling with their own limitations in their social behaviors, for some reason, I'm drawn to characters like that.
Gbenga Akinnagbe
#6. 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
#7. I find human behavior to be fascinating, which is probably why I'm an actor, and I think that there are a lot of dangerous misconceptions about mental illness in our society, and I would like to be a part of remedying that - particularly the stigma that surrounds so many mental illnesses.
Laura Benanti
#8. Really, becoming a writer sounds more like a mental illness than a professional choice.
Shannon Hale
#9. 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
#10. It would be absurd for me to diagnose Sarah Palin with a sprained ankle, let alone any sort of mental illness.
Nicolle Wallace
#11. This is as close as I've ever heard to a Thomas and Carmel argument. And as special as it is to listen to your friends argue over whether or not you have a mental illness, I'm starting to get the urge to go back to class.
Kendare Blake
#12. It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window.
Sam Harris
#13. I know that if I could really understand mental illness, then it would be appropriate to make a big career shift. I would become a therapist and a leader in terms of mental illness. But I'm not in the position.
John Forbes Nash Jr.
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. If her mental prowess became increasingly replaced with mental illness,
Lisa Genova
#18. Racism is a common delusion, a mental illness that can be cured with truthful education.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
#19. I don't find anything upsetting or gross or degrading about fighting with a mental illness: Bipolar or Schizophrenia.
Kangana Ranaut
#20. Seeing movies about mental illness, a lot of falseness has leapt out at me over the years. So I just focused on what I remembered, the real experience of seeing somebody like that. And as an adult, I've had family members who are bipolar, so I've seen it again.
Maya Forbes
#21. 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
#22. I am furiously happy. It's not a cure for mental illness ... it's a weapon, designed to counter it. It's a way to take back some of the joy that's robbed from you when you're crazy.
Jenny Lawson
#24. To the fantastic mental illness of Rationalism, hard facts are regrettable things, and to talk about them is to create them.
Francis Parker Yockey
#25. The cycles of dysfunction and mental illness did not have to carry over from generation to generation. You just had to educate yourself. Erika
Liane Moriarty
#26. Even now she can't decide. She thinks about flipping a coin. Heads she goes, tails she stays. But isn't indecisiveness an early sign of mental illness?
Judy Blume
#27. The Pythagoreans, you have to remember, were extremely weird. Their philosophy was a chunky stew of things we'd now call mathematics, things we'd now call religion, and things we'd now call mental illness.
Jordan Ellenberg
#28. Successful writing is a slow, daily, meticulous form of mental illness.
Don Roff
#30. I do not know a better cure for mental illness than a book.
Irving Stone
#31. The point is this: if you cannot separate the phenotype of mental illness from creative impulses, then you cannot separate the genotype of mental illness and creative impulse.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#32. 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
#33. We'd like to believe that by discussing what has occurred will change things. Until now, here's a mental illness that must be dealt with by going to the root.
Benjamin Janey
#34. I love being from a screwed up family. We have everything in my family: prescription drug abuse, mental illness, one of my uncles is a Mormon.
Christopher Titus
#35. We are a conspiracy of hope and we are pressing back against the strong tide of oppression which for centuries has been the legacy of those of us who are labelled with mental illness. We are refusing to reduce human beings to illnesses.
Patricia Deegan
#36. 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
#37. We're becoming so much better at destigmatizing all sorts of things, including mental illness in 'Silver Linings.'
Jacki Weaver
#38. 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
#39. I have a mental illness, but that doesn't stop me from being mentally capable.
Lisa M. Cronkhite
#40. The awareness of the damage done by severe mental illness - to the individual himself and to others - and fears that it may return again play a decisive role in many suicides
Kay Redfield Jamison
#41. Unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life are not signs of mental illness, but of growing intelligence.
Ken Wilber
#42. 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
#43. We shall therefore compare the concept of homosexuality as heresy, prevalent in the days of the witch-hunts, with the concept of homosexuality as mental illness, prevalent today.
Thomas Szasz
#44. Psychoanalysis is that mental illness for which it regards itself as therapy.
Karl Kraus
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. There is nothing worse that you can do to a human being in America today than give them a mental illness kind of label and tell them they need drugs and these children are 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 years-old being treated in this manner,
Peter Breggin
#48. Social psychologist argued that even severe mental illness was the result of society labeling unusual behavior rather than of biochemical processes.
Thomas J. Scheff
#49. 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
#51. Over recent years, urbanisation, globalisation and the destruction of local cultures has led to a rise in the prevalence of mental illness in the developing world.
Iain McGilchrist
#52. 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
#53. We have to get the word out that mental illnesses can be diagnosed and treated, and almost everyone suffering from mental illness can live meaningful lives in their communities.
Rosalynn Carter
#54. 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
#55. I enjoy the fact that, as a gay man, there's relatively little pressure on me to act like a grown-up, but also I see the pitfalls that we're susceptible to, addiction, isolation, loneliness, mental illness, not to mention the embarrassing fashion choices.
Vestal McIntyre
#56. If too much has been made of the symptoms of Plath's mental illness, so too little attention has been paid to its possible causes. Sylvia Plath was an angry young woman born in a country and at a time that only exacerbated and intensified her fury.
Andrew Wilson
#57. What if Van Gogh had taken medication for his mental illness? Would the world have been deprived of a great artist?
Peter D. Kramer
#58. The vast majority of people who have mental illness problems never hurt anybody.
Penn Jillette
#59. 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
#60. 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.
#61. 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
#62. The guilt I felt for having a mental illness was horrible. I prayed for a broken bone that would heal in six weeks. But that never happened. I was cursed with an illness that nobody could see and nobody knew much about.
Andy Behrman
#63. 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
#64. Never underestimate the commercial value of mental illness.
Moriah Jovan
#65. Our family suffers from a hereditary condition called, generally, mental illness. Specifically, multiple family members in successive generations have suffered from either bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.
Victor LaValle
#66. Sometimes, patients with serious mental illness, just as with other serious medical illnesses, require hospitalization. In the absence of available public or private hospital beds, there are few options.
Thomas R. Insel
#67. Your protagonist suffers from mental illness, but that fact is not central to the
Leslie J. Anderson
#68. Finding a calm place inside myself through meditation kind of helped me to get over a lot of mental illness ... it's just been a really great thing in my life.
Roseanne Barr
#69. As for wondering if it's okay to be who you are--that's not a symptom of mental illness. That's a symptom of being a person.
Jeff Garvin
#70. There should be no more shame in acknowledging (mental illness) than in acknowledging a battle with high blood pressure or the sudden appearance of a malignant tumor.
Jeffrey R. Holland
#71. I will say, in open adoption, all these choices you make about race, about the amount of mental illness you can deal with, about special needs and physical maladies, you have to lay all this out there before you know anybody's story.
Jennifer Gilmore
#72. This is a word that is not a scientific term. This is a rhetorical tool of psychological manipulation ... Because everyone knows if you dare to say homosexuality is wrong ... you are a homophobe, which means you have a mental illness. That's what's built into this terminology.
Scott Lively
#73. Mental illness is by far the most misunderstood, and stigmatized, of all afflictions. Statistically, one in three families in the U.S. deals with mental illness, and yet it's rarely discussed in the open. It's time for that to change.
Neal Shusterman
#74. If people can talk about having breast cancer, why can't people who have mental illness talk about mental illness? Until we're able to do that, we're not going to be treated with the same kind of respect for our diseases as other people.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#75. Someone may look normal on the outside, but that doesn't mean they are on the inside. Some people may look stunning, but on the inside they are plagued by a mental illness. Never judge someone by how they look. Think before you speak; don't come to conclusions about someone.
Various
#76. I've invaded the walls of the asylums with my ink pen. The way they look at mental illness won't be the same again
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#77. I know I'm not a self-indulgent idiot; I also know I'm not the second coming of Deepak Chopra. If I had believed either of those, or both, as some people do when they get famous, that's when the mental illness arrives.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#78. Age, mental illness, and failure are all in the mind.
They put the pain there to let you know it hurts.
David Holmes
#79. I think the stigma attached to mental illness will disappear just like it did for cancer years ago.
Sally Graham
#80. Faking mental illness to get out of a prison sentence, he explained, is exactly the kind of deceitful and manipulative act you'd expect of a psychopath.
Jon Ronson
#82. Mental illness doesn't choose the most talented or the smartest or the richest or the poorest. It shows no mercy and often arrives like an unexpected storm, dropping an endless downpour on young dreams.
Steve Lopez
#83. I think we need to talk about mental illness a lot more. People complain about tax dollars and say we don't have the money. But if we can't put some of our investments, or some of our money back into humans, isn't that where it all begins?
Nia Long
#84. The Stonewall riots were a key moment for gay people. Throughout modern history, gays had thought of themselves as something like a mental illness or maybe a sin or a crime. Gay liberation allowed us to make the leap to being a 'minority group,' which made life much easier.
Edmund White
#85. Love is a mental illness, an obsessive-compulsive disorder romanticized!
Eric Jerome Dickey
#86. My goal is to see that mental illness is treated like cancer.
Jane Pauley
#87. Playing someone who has a mental illness, the responsibility to not stuff it up is really strong. You have to get it right. Not just for the people who are sufferers, but for the people who care about them - their loved ones.
Debra Lawrance
#88. Today, over 50 percent of prison and jail inmates in the United States have a diagnosed mental illness, a rate nearly five times greater than that of the general adult population.
Bryan Stevenson
#89. All my life, I had this idea that if I could unravel the mystery that was my mother, then I could help save her. But it didn't really work. We were close, but she struggled with mental illness and alcoholism, and it was rough at times.
Jennifer McMahon
#90. I've struggled with many forms of mental illness since I was a kid, but clinical depression is a semiregular visitor and anxiety disorder is my long-term abusive boyfriend.
Jenny Lawson
#91. I had some experience in dealing with people who have mental illness and depression, but I didn't see the signs in myself. I couldn't ask for help because I didn't know I needed help.
Clara Hughes
#92. We were never supposed to live until 40. We were built to self-destruct at 30, whether from cancer or mental illness. We're all going way beyond our expiration date.
Douglas Coupland
#93. For the most part, mental illness is caused by an absence of or defect in the love that a particular child required from its particular parents for successful maturation and spiritual growth. It
M. Scott Peck
#94. We know that mental illness is not something that happens to other people. It touches us all. Why then is mental illness met with so much misunderstanding and fear?
Tipper Gore
#95. Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.
Susanna Kaysen
#96. It's very painful to love someone who is wrestling with either an addiction or a mental illness because you want the best for them. And it seems so hard, and it's frustrating.
Maya Forbes
#97. Stigma against mental illness is a scourge with many faces, and the medical community wears a number of those faces.
Elyn R. Saks
#98. I used my mental illness as a springboard to the rest of my life.
Clive Culverhouse
#99. He hated it when adults told him he only felt the way he did because he was young. As if being young was like being insane or drunk, like the convictions he held were hallucinations caused by a mental illness that could only be cured by waiting five years.
Cory Doctorow
#100. Mental illness is so much more complicated than any pill that any mortal could invent
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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