Mental Health Quotes

A more fundamental problem with labelling human distress and deviance as mental disorder is that it reduces a complex, important, and distinct part of human life to nothing more than a biological illness or defect, not to be processed or understood, or in some cases even embraced, but to be ‘treated’ and ‘cured’ by any means possible—often with drugs that may be doing much more harm than good. This biological reductiveness, along with the stigma that it attracts, shapes the person’s interpretation and experience of his distress or deviance, and, ultimately, his relation to himself, to others, and to the world. Moreover, to call out every difference and deviance as mental disorder is also to circumscribe normality and define sanity, not as tranquillity or possibility, which are the products of the wisdom that is being denied, but as conformity, placidity, and a kind of mediocrity.

~ Neel Burton

Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy. In a similar sense suffering is not always a pathological phenomenon; rather than being a symptom of neurosis, suffering may well be a human achievement, especially if the suffering grows out of existential frustration... Existential frustration is neither pathological or pathogenic.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

Surely a good therapist should produce a Dorian Gray-style portrait from under the couch so the patient can see the person they really are.

~ Rosamund Lupton

Self Hate: The deadliest 'dis-ease' experienced by wounded souls.

~ T.f. Hodge

The problem with social media is that it's great for your ego, but terrible for your sanity.

~ Andrena Sawyer

Attitude Is EverythingWe live in a culture that is blind to betrayal and intolerant of emotional pain. In New Age crowds here on the West Coast, where your attitude is considered the sole determinant of the impact an event has on you, it gets even worse.In these New Thought circles, no matter what happens to you, it is assumed that you have created your own reality. Not only have you chosen the event, no matter how horrible, for your personal growth. You also chose how you interpret what happened—as if there are no interpersonal facts, only interpretations.The upshot of this perspective is that your suffering would vanish if only you adopted a more evolved perspective and stopped feeling aggrieved. I was often kindly reminded (and believed it myself), “there are no victims.” How can you be a victim when you are responsible for your circumstances?When you most need validation and support to get through the worst pain of your life, to be confronted with the well-meaning, but quasi-religious fervor of these insidious half-truths can be deeply demoralizing. This kind of advice feeds guilt and shame, inhibits grieving, encourages grandiosity and can drive you to be alone to shield your vulnerability.

~ Sandra Lee Dennis

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

I am to stupid to give up, not smart enough to die

~ Michael J Granata

Imagine how many suicide victims would still be with us, if only the right person said the right thing at the right time.

~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

We're saying the story doesn't end here, that the air in your lungs is there for a reason.

~ Jamie Tworkowski

They're simply seeking an interlude from emotional pain and searing mental agony, a sleep from which they'll awaken to discover they're the person they always wanted to be.

~ Gillibran Brown

Cheryl was aided in her search by the Internet. Each time she remembered a name that seemed to be important in her life, she tried to look up that person on the World Wide Web. The names and pictures Cheryl found were at once familiar and yet not part of her conscious memory: Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, Dr. Louis 'Jolly' West, Dr. Ewen Cameron, Dr. Martin Orne and others had information by and about them on the Web. Soon, she began looking up sites related to childhood incest and found that some of the survivor sites mentioned the same names, though in the context of experiments performed on small children. Again, some names were familiar. Then Cheryl began remembering what turned out to be triggers from old programmes. 'The song, The Green, Green Grass of home kept running through my mind. I remembered that my father sang it as well. It all made no sense until I remembered that the last line of the song tells of being buried six feet under that green, green grass. Suddenly, it came to me that this was a suicide programme of the government. 'I went crazy. I felt that my body would explode unless I released some of the pressure I felt within, so I grabbed a [pair ofl scissors and cut myself with the blade so I bled. In my distracted state, I was certain that the bleeding would let the pressure out. I didn't know Lynn had felt the same way years earlier. I just knew I had to do it Cheryl says. She had some barbiturates and other medicine in the house. 'One particularly despondent night, I took several pills. It wasn't exactly a suicide try, though the pills could have killed me. Instead, I kept thinking that I would give myself a fifty-fifty chance of waking up the next morning. Maybe the pills would kill me. Maybe the dose would not be lethal. It was all up to God. I began taking pills each night. Each-morning I kept awakening.

~ Cheryl Hersha

Bear no malice for the ones who leave you.

~ Bert V. Royal

It was soon after that I, overwhelmed with the implications of that memory, overdosed - well, somebody did but as it was my mouth and my stomach that was involved I had to take the consequences. Somehow or other (did an alter ring him?) Bruce (from my support group) got to know, drove over and took us to the hospital.

~ Carolyn Bramhall

I, myself, spent 9 years in an insane asylum and never had any suicidal tendencies, but I know that every conversation I had with a psychiatrist during the morning visit made me long to hang myself because I was aware that I could not slit his throat.

~ Antonin Artaud

No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.

~ Sigmund Freud

The reason I don't Kill Myselfis because I know I can.

~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

You see, people are everywhere. They are everything. No matter who we are, or what we do, people are involved in our lives. If those people are poisonous, our lives will be poisonous also.

~ S.r. Crawford

What is the date? What is the time? … Great, that’s what Now is. And every second, your ‘Now’ changes. Because all we have is Now. We are continuously living in the Now. Not yesterday, not tomorrow, but Now. Today. The present. And I need you to live in it. To truly appreciate it. To breathe and feel yourself breathing.

~ S.r. Crawford

Time passes no matter what you do.

~ S.r. Crawford

Thing was, after the hurricane, life went on. You had to buy milk, fix the broken windows, play some Warhammer, discuss some girls. Wow!

~ Teresa Toten

Never let your desire for love override your sense of self and value.

~ Izey Victoria Odiase

you look at me and cryeverything hurtsi hold you and whisperbut everything can heal

~ Rupi Kaur

None of us know how to fix ourselves, at least not entirely, not well enough.

~ Catherine Lacey

Someday those bruises inside you will heal. You can't know when someday will come, or what life will look like when it finally does. ... But in a way it doesn't even matter because someday isn't what we have. What we have is right now, this moment, when things aren't okay yet, but in a way they are already, because in the end they will be, and as long as that's true, it's enough.

~ Lauren Miller

But, darling, I need you to know, you loving me will not heal me. Please realize, I already know that. And I do not expect it to.

~ R. Y.s. Perez

Recovery is not so much a dream at it is a plan.

~ Carolyn Spring

...some patients resist the diagnosis of a post-traumatic disorder. They may feel stigmatized by any psychiatric diagnosis or wish to deny their condition out of a sense of pride. Some people feel that acknowledging psychological harm grants a moral victory to the perpetrator, in a way that acknowledging physical harm does not.

~ Judith Lewis Herman

I'm not crazy, I was abused. I'm not shy, I'm protecting myself. I'm not bitter, I'm speaking the truth. I'm not hanging onto the past, I've been damaged. I'm not delusional, I lived a nightmare. I'm not weak, I was trusting. I'm not giving up, I'm healing. I'm not incapable of love, I'm giving. I'm not alone. I see you all here. I'm fighting this.

~ Rene Smith

As you recover, you will find yourself letting go of many of your negative beliefs. You will discover that many of the so-called truths you were raised with and forced to believe are not truths at all. With this perspective, you will come to see, for example, that the names you were called as a child are simply not true. You are not ‘stupid,’ ‘lazy,’ ‘ugly,’ or a ‘liar’. You can discover just who you really are. You can let go of your pretenses and masks and discover who the real person is underneath.

~ Beverly Engel

Why do I take a blade and slash my arms? Why do I drink myself into a stupor? Why do I swallow bottles of pills and end up in A&E having my stomach pumped? Am I seeking attention? Showing off? The pain of the cuts releases the mental pain of the memories, but the pain of healing lasts weeks. After every self-harming or overdosing incident I run the risk of being sectioned and returned to a psychiatric institution, a harrowing prospect I would not recommend to anyone.So, why do I do it? I don't. If I had power over the alters, I'd stop them. I don't have that power. When they are out, they're out. I experience blank spells and lose time, consciousness, dignity. If I, Alice Jamieson, wanted attention, I would have completed my PhD and started to climb the academic career ladder. Flaunting the label 'doctor' is more attention-grabbing that lying drained of hope in hospital with steri-strips up your arms and the vile taste of liquid charcoal absorbing the chemicals in your stomach. In most things we do, we anticipate some reward or payment. We study for status and to get better jobs; we work for money; our children are little mirrors of our social standing; the charity donation and trip to Oxfam make us feel good. Every kindness carries the potential gift of a responding kindness: you reap what you sow. There is no advantage in my harming myself; no reason for me to invent delusional memories of incest and ritual abuse. There is nothing to be gained in an A&E department.

~ Alice Jamieson

The healing process is best described as a spiral. Survivors go through the stages once, sometimes many times; sometimes in one order, sometimes in another. Each time they hit a stage again, they move up the spiral: they can integrate new information and a broader range of feelings, utilize more resources, take better care of themselves, and make deeper changes.” Allies in Healing by Laura Davis

~ Laura Hough

As Lynn began getting psychologically better, she took me to a variety of sites. She taught me how to read trail markers. In the end, Lynn's stories could not be denied. She was not only a victim, she wanted badly to heal. As her experiences were told and worked through, as she slowly began to come to grips with her past, the personalities within her have slowly begun to heal.

~ Lynn Hersha

Many survivors insist they’re not courageous: ‘If I were courageous I would have stopped the abuse.’ ‘If I were courageous, I wouldn't be scared’... Most of us have it mixed up. You don’t start with courage and then face fear. You become courageous because you face your fear.

~ Laura Davis

The most important thing in defining child sexual abuse is the experience of the child. It takes very little for a child’s world to be devastated. A single experience can have a profound impact on a child’s life. A man sticks his hand in his daughter’s underpants, or strokes his son’s penis once, and for that child, the world is never the same again.

~ Laura Hough

Although healing brings a better life, it also threatens to permanently alter life as you’ve known it. Your relationships, your position in the world, even your sense of identity may change. Coping patterns that have served you for a lifetime will be called into question. When you make the commitment to heal, you risk losing much of what is familiar. As a result one part of you may want to heal while another resists change.

~ Laura Davis

Theirs was the eternal youth of an alternating self, a youth with the constant although unfulfilled promise of growing up

~ Flora Rheta Schreiber

What you loved as a child, you will love forever

~ Francesca Zappia

You do not need to be temperamental or upset to be a novelist. Don’t embrace the tortured artist rhetoric that any life difficulties might serve to benefit and enhance your writing. That’s damaging. Counterintuitive. Writing can be so incredibly lonely, and when you’re alone with your thoughts for long enough to produce a hundred thousand words of your own headspace, it can be scary. Suffering is not good for your art. Mental health care is. So talk to someone other than your future readers about the problems you are facing. Someone you know and trust. There is no shame in asking for help.

~ Bryant A. Loney

A healthy PFC means a healthy cognitive grip over the world with very little elements of prejudice.

~ Abhijit Naskar