Top 100 Quotes About Mentally Ill

#1. Van Dusen emphasizes that our common conception of the mentally ill is flawed. The majority of them, he says, are not "raving lunatics" as one might think. "Most of these people have become entangled in inner processes and simply fail to manage their lives well.

Louis Proud

#2. America is in a runaway-train position and dragging all the world with it. It's grotesquely mentally ill.

Joni Mitchell

#3. The inanity of her remark infuriated him. 'Good grief don't you understand Janet? At this point I'm thoroughly delusional. I'm as mentally ill as it's possible to be. It's incredible that I can communicate with you at all. It's a credit to my ego-strength that I'm not at this point totally autistic.

Philip K. Dick

#4. Do not proffer sympathy to the mentally ill; it is a bottomless pit. Tell them firmly, "I am not paid to listen to this drivel - you are a terminal fool!" Otherwise, they make you as crazy as they are.

William S. Burroughs

#5. If there was acceptance of the mentally ill in the Catholic Church, the entire Curia would resign!

Sinead O'Connor

#6. He had never been involved with the mentally ill before, but he now felt more than ever that there should be strong international laws against them being too good-looking.

Lorrie Moore

#7. I have a very intimate knowledge of the world of the mentally ill and of life inside of, especially, public hospitals and the way people are treated in there and the way that they try to survive in there.

Victor LaValle

#8. All vets are mentally ill in some way and government should prevent them from owning firearms.

Dianne Feinstein

#9. After that I couldn't show my face outside. I lost my identity and balance. I was still living with my parents, and they were my only friends. For so many people, this thing with the nurse was confirmation that I must be mad or mentally ill.

Mathias Rust

#10. I would pay to have those adjudications enrolled into the federal background system so we could detect people who are mentally ill before they buy a gun. That is a real problem.

Rand Paul

#11. I think that we're all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better - and maybe not all that much better after all.

Stephen King

#12. When I said that the mentally ill should be in institutions, public universities weren't the kind of institutions I had in mind.

Robert Stacy McCain

#13. I'm just tired of people saying I'm a self-hating Jew because I'm critical of Israel or make fun of old Jewish ladies. I do not hate myself. And Jews who criticize Israel aren't necessarily mentally ill.

Harvey Pekar

#14. As massive numbers of homeless, hungry, unemployed, drug-addicted, illiterate, and mentally ill people vanish behind its walls, the social problems of extreme poverty, homelessness, hunger, unemployment, drug addiction, illiteracy, and mental illness become more ignorable, too.

Maya Schenwar

#15. I bored myself to tears with the daytime television drama of confrontation (I've been wronged!). I winced at sluggish morning half-memories of wearing wrongness like a lampshade on my head (I'm mentally ill!).

Merri Lisa Johnson

#16. Use of a mentally ill person's involuntary confession is antithetical to the notion of fundamental fairness embodied in the due process clause.

William J. Brennan Jr.

#17. Mentally ill. It's a phrase that once scared me, but now I wear it like an old jacket, comfortable but ugly.

Jenny Lawson

#18. As soon as they leave, Leon says to me: I disagree, sir. There are people who aren't insane, and I'm one of them. People who generalize are mentally ill.

Milton Rokeach

#19. The biggest gift of being unambiguously mentally ill is the time I've saved myself trying to be normal.

Mark Vonnegut

#20. Labeling a child as mentally ill is stigmatization, not diagnosis. Giving a child a psychiatric drug is poisoning, not treatment.

Thomas Szasz

#21. You don't tell someone who's mentally ill or struggling, who's having a low time in their lives, to harden up, because it doesn't work.

John Kirwan

#22. The worst thing about the fantasies of the mentally ill is that they're so damned consistent. They never let up. They never give you any rest.

Orson Scott Card

#23. Other countries care for their mentally ill. Making them debate on TV is just cruel.

Andy Borowitz

#24. I think that the genes for being an artist and mentally ill aren't just related, they are the same gene, but try telling that to a bill collector. We

Neil Hilborn

#25. 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

#26. And indeed, if Evgeny Irtenev was mentally ill, then all people are just as mentally ill, and the most mentally ill are undoubtably those who see signs of madness in others that they do not see in themselves.

Leo Tolstoy

#27. These 'philosophers', etc., seem unaware, to give a specific example, that by teaching and preaching 'identity', which is empirically non-existent in this actual world, they are neurologically training future generations in the pathological identifications found in the 'mentally' ill or maladjusted.

Alfred Korzybski

#28. Now whenever Franny or Jim spoke to someone who kept a car in Manhattan, they reacted with quiet horror, like people who'd been subjected to the rantings of a mentally ill person at a cocktail party.

Emma Straub

#29. America's prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill.

Bryan Stevenson

#30. The difference between a healthy person and one who is mentally ill is the fact that the healthy one has all the mental illnesses, and the mentally ill person has only one.

Robert Musil

#31. A genius is a mentally ill person with an audience

Tim Minchin

#32. I get lots of awards for being mentally ill. Apparently, I am better at being mentally ill than almost anything else I've ever done. Seriously - I have a shelf of awards for being bipolar.

Carrie Fisher

#33. Oh, the beautiful smiles of the insane. Soon, he was sure, there would be a study that showed that the mentally ill were actually more attractive than other people. Dating proved it!

Lorrie Moore

#34. After Huguette Clark died in 2011 at age 104, 19 relatives challenged her will, claiming she was mentally ill and had been defrauded by her nurse, attorney and accountant.

Bill Dedman

#35. If one cannot tell a difference between fantasy and reality, it is either that one or a society around mentally ill

Uri Norwich

#36. I have hundreds if not tens of thousands of fans ... The people who have negative things to say are typically loser-type people who are probably in some cases mentally ill.

Jason Calacanis

#37. In America it is not considered to be mentally ill when a woman advances on her prey in a discotheque setting with hardy cocktails present.

Madonna Ciccone

#38. When they are treated, the seriously mentally ill aren't more violent than the general population. If untreated, though, they are.

Rich Lowry

#39. I was thrilled when this year's National Book Award for Young People's Literature went to Neal Schusterman's 'Challenger Deep.' This brilliant book takes you into the mind of a mentally ill teenager and deserves all the accolades it's received.

John Corey Whaley

#40. I think that I'm so psychotic and so mentally ill that if I could tap into that I could do something really interesting.

Megan Fox

#41. Someone can be mentally ill, but if they are young and beautiful and their life is going well, people don't notice because at that point the cracks are almost imperceptible.

Mary Harron

#42. Being a housewife, makes women sick.It may therefore be that married women say they are happy because they are sick.To be happy in a relationship which imposes so many impediments on her, as traditional marriage does, women must be slightly mentally ill

Jessie Bernard

#43. New Age eccentricity could only take you so far before you wandered into mentally ill territory.

M.M. McLaughlin

#44. a manual for how to build a mentally ill child

David Foster Wallace

#45. Those who become mentally ill often have a history of chronic pain.

Gene Tierney

#46. We no longer believe, as we did 250 years ago, that the mentally ill are animals, but we are not yet ready to grant that they are fully human either.

Paul Gruchow

#47. I have seen the cycle of a non-violent, mentally ill offender who is arrested repeatedly and put into the system repeatedly-never being treated for his illness and, as a result, becoming more and more ill.

Mike DeWine

#48. Dead kids are put on pedestals, but mentally ill kids get hidden under the rug.

Neal Shusterman

#49. For decades now, [Fuller] Torrey has been warning America what would happen if the dangerously mentally ill were deinstitutionalized, and it's all come true. Today, the only place we can put mental patients is on MSNBC.

Ann Coulter

#50. To kill for fun is the job of the psychopaths! And what is a matador, apart from being a mentally ill person?

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#51. Anxious. Intriguing word. It literally means, "to be divided" or "distracted." It conveys the idea of being so mentally ill at ease that you cannot do what you need to do because you are so distracted in your thinking.

Charles R. Swindoll

#52. Children of the mentally ill learn early on how not to be a bother, especially if they grew up with neglect. As my sister insisted once, when she was in severe pain after injuring her ankle, 'This isn't me! This is not who I am!

Mira Bartok

#53. There's been another mass shooting by a crazy person, and liberals still refuse to consider institutionalizing the dangerously mentally ill.

Ann Coulter

#54. I am mentally ill. I can say that. I am not ashamed of that. I survived that, I'm still surviving it, but bring it on. Better me than you.

Carrie Fisher

#55. Parents are the most likely to be victims of the violence of their mentally ill children.

Rich Lowry

#56. I'm not mentally ill," she insisted, fidgeting in her chair. "I'm just very neurotic and I'm always falling in love with assholes.

Pat Conroy

#57. 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

#58. There are congressmen in our congregation, judges, federal reserve governors. And there are also people who are homeless and some who are mentally ill. To be able to talk to each of those people is something that I've had to learn how to do over the years.

James Green Somerville

#59. 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

#60. It is not the homeless, mentally ill or extremely cunning people that we have to be afraid of. When someone loses everything that meant something to them is when people should get very afraid. A person that has nothing to lose is the scariest person on earth.

Shannon L. Alder

#61. 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

#62. I don't buy that there's nothing we can do to stop criminals and the mentally ill from killing if they want to.

Mike Quigley

#63. I'm either mentally ill or Jewish. I can't sometimes tell the difference.

Roseanne Barr

#64. I think that every young person is a little mentally ill, you know? If we're not totally shutting down, we're all a little bit mentally ill in our twenties and maybe into our early thirties.

Gaby Hoffmann

#65. Science teachers and the mentally ill, that's all Jazz is for.

Noel Fielding

#66. There was a mental institution near my house, and I would donate time teaching mentally ill patients how to do ceramics. I photographed them as well. So those were my first pictures.

Steven Klein

#67. It is now no mystery that some quite influential 'philosophers' were 'mentally' ill.

Alfred Korzybski

#68. There are such things as delusions, but not every unlikely vision that the mentally ill have is imaginary.

Shepherd Hoodwin

#69. Prison is quite literally a ghetto in the most classic sense of the world, a place where the U.S. government now puts not only the dangerous but also the inconvenient - people who are mentally ill, people who are addicts, people who are poor and uneducated and unskilled.

Piper Kerman

#70. Trying to prove you're not a psychopath is even harder than trying to prove you're not mentally ill,' said Tony.

Jon Ronson

#71. Unless they're a fugitive or a felon, or adjudicated mentally ill, we're not against them buying guns at all.

Sarah Brady

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. Josh turns to me. "I can't believe she's writing these things." "Not she," I say. "Me." "Why would anyone say this stuff about themselves on the Internet? It's crazy!" "Exactly," I say. "I'm going to be mentally ill in fifteen years, and that's why my husband doesn't want to be around me.

Jay Asher

#75. I think there's a very fine line between the type of performing that some actors do, and being in a state in your mind where you actually believe what's going on. If we weren't actors, what would we do with that ability? Would we not be slightly insane? Mentally ill? I don't know.

Samantha Morton

#76. There was however, a group of 507 individuals who were permanent street dwellers [in Miami.] These 507 were not indigent, down-on-their-luck families. They were single people and every one of them was mentally ill.

Pete Earley

#77. It is only too true that a lot of artists are mentally ill - it's a life which, to put it mildly, makes one an outsider. I'm all right when I completely immerse myself in work, but I'll always remain half crazy.

Vincent Van Gogh

#78. Well, many insane people and seriously mentally ill people seem very reasonable.

Alan Dershowitz

#79. Suicides do not end their lives because they are weak, mentally ill, or depressed - though certainly they may be all those things. They are in blinding, all-consuming psychic pain, and perhaps on that final poisonous day they can find no reason not to.

Jill Bialosky

#80. My professional opinion and diagnosis as a graphic designer and photographer is that Kate Gosselin is mentally ill

Robert Hoffman

#81. Most Radiohead songs are actually REM songs, I just have a mentally ill child read the lyrics aloud and then I change the melodies a bit.

Thom Yorke

#82. I meet human beings who are flawed, who are mentally ill and have enormous problems, but I don't think I've ever met someone who was a totally dark energy that had no humanity or sense of love or affection for anything in their life. That's very rare.

Richard Gere

#83. The difference between my fans and Kurt's is that my fans know they're mentally ill.

Kurt Vonnegut

#84. Everyone is mentally ill, they just haven't figured out a name for yours yet.

Chris Sprudz

#85. Normal people who weren't raised by mentally ill goats probably took the feeling of safety for granted. They only noticed when they suddenly felt unsafe. When the hands reach up for under the bed and grab their ankles, they scream, whereas I'm like Wait, can you scratch my knee before you kill me?

Augusten Burroughs

#86. Clearly, there are a thousand and one scenarios for how someone can slip through the cracks. I'll walk down the street and see a homeless person, and I'll want to stop them and say, How did this happen? Where's your mother? Are you physically ill? Mentally ill?

William Baldwin

#87. Having waited my entire life to get an award for something, anything ... I now get awards all the time for being mentally ill. It's better than being bad at being insane, right? How tragic would it be to be runner-up for Bipolar Woman of the Year?

Carrie Fisher

#88. The reason why there's such a rigid repression of the mentally ill is the psyche of humanity senses something. It senses that it doesn't want to deal with the unknown.

Frederick Lenz

#89. The diagnosis of homosexuality as a "disorder" is a contributing factor to the pathology of those homosexuals who do become mentally ill ... Nothing is more likely to make you sick than being constantly told that you are sick.

Ronald Goldman

#90. He loved the idea that he was mentally ill," said his daughter Monica, "and hated the idea he was an alcoholic" - that is, bipolar disorder was a bona fide illness, while alcoholism smacked of a shameful personal failing.

Blake Bailey

#91. I'm going to be 58, and I'm a woman. In this business, that seems to be a bigger crime than being mentally ill.

Patty Duke

#92. Expanding background checks will help create a uniform standard for all gun purchases and prevent criminals and the dangerously mentally ill from obtaining powerful weapons.

Gabrielle Giffords

#93. Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses. Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill. And some people, like John Nash, are both.

Nancy C. Andreasen

#94. Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artifact of your mental illness.

Hilary Mantel

#95. May the state fence in the harmless mentally ill solely to save its citizens from exposure to those whose ways are different? One might as well ask if the state, to avoid public unease, could incarcerate all who are physically unattractive or socially eccentric.

Potter Stewart

#96. Psychiatrists say that 1 of 4 people are mentally ill. Check 3 friends. If they are okay, you're it.

Henny Youngman

#97. The mentally ill may have shattered lives, but how that is different than the way sin distorts our ability to comprehend who we are as God's creatures is not clear.

Stanley Hauerwas

#98. Mentally ill people come from all belief systems.

Penn Jillette

#99. I do not believe that I will ever write an adult novel from an animal's point of view unless someday it becomes suddenly appealing to me to make a narrator a mentally ill pet. Never say never.

Andrea Seigel

#100. 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

Famous Authors

Popular Topics

Scroll to Top