Mental Illness Quotes

All of us must do our best to live gracefully in the present moment. I now see depression as akin to being tied to a chair with restraints on my wrists. It took me a long time to realize that I only magnify my distress by struggling for freedom. My pain diminished when I gave up trying to escape completely from it. However, don't interpret my current approach to depression as utterly fatalistic. I do whatever I can to dull depression's pain, while premising my life on its continuing presence. The theologian and philosopher Thomas Moore puts it well with his distinction between cure and care. While cure implies the eradication of trouble, care appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life.

~ David A. Karp

When both she and I had to deal with our respective demons, my sister saw the darkness as being within and part of herself, the family and the world. I, instead, saw it as a stranger; however lodged within my mind and soul the darkness became, it almost always seemed an outside force that was at war with my natural self.

~ Kay Redfield Jamison

God only knew what ran underneath the fierce self-discipline and emotional control that had come with my upbringing. But the cracks were there, I knew it, and they frightened me.

~ Kay Redfield Jamison

I used mental illness as a springboard to rest of my life.

~ Clive Culverhouse

I used my mental illness as a springboard to the rest of my life.

~ Clive Culverhouse

We dig holes for ourselves, of comfortable living, and it’s hard to see just how deep down you are until you suddenly want to take a look at the world up there, some fresh airand realise you can’t get up. You’re too far down.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

Depression is our way of telling ourselves that something is seriously wrong and needs working through and changing.

~ Neel Burton

There's a quote from 'The Breakfast Club' that goes We're all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it. I have it on a poster but I took a Sharpie to it and scratched out the word hiding because it reminds me that there's a certain pride and freedom that comes from wearing your unique bizarreness like a badge of honor.

~ Hafiz

Even when everything's going your way you can still be sad. Or anxious. Or uncomfortably numb. Because you can't always control your brain or your emotions even when things are perfect.

~ Jenny Lawson

Waking up breaks my heart.Getting dressed breaks my arms.Joining the crowd breaks my legs.Letting someone in...does me in.

~ Casey Renee Kiser

As it stands, the diagnostic criteria for depression are so loose that two people with absolutely no symptoms in common can both end up with the same unitary diagnosis of depression. For this reason especially, the concept of depression as a mental disorder has been charged with being little more than a socially constructed dustbin for all manner of human suffering.

~ Neel Burton

So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me.

~ Herman Melville

If you could read my mind, you wouldn't be smiling.

~ Tamara Ireland Stone

I needed some space to lay myself out, so that I could decide which pieces I wanted to pick up.

~ Fennel Hudson

There's memory clutter, which reminds you of an important person, achievement, or event from your past. I think memory clutter often gathers in the homes of people with some degree of depression. And then there's I might need it one day clutter, in which people hang on to stuff in anticipation of an imagined future. Among these folks, I've noticed a recurring theme of anxiety...Maybe it's possible that the stuff we own and obsess over is the physical manifestation of the mental health issues that challenge our minds. --p29.

~ Peter Walsh

Depression is a phobia of happiness.

~ Jack Deveny

The pain will always be in you — but you will not always be in pain.

~ Abby Norman

Take it from me, that kind of torment causes you to retreat to a place in your mind where you are so strong that nothing and no one can bother you. Or so you think! What you don't realize is that each time an incident occurs, you retreat inside of yourself a little bit at a time, until one day you might not recognize who YOU are.

~ Yassin Hall

It's amazing the things that the heart and mind can endure. No one ever told me that growing up, so I often spent my childhood thinking something was wrong with me.

~ Yassin Hall

The depression was not incapacitating. It made it hard to take a lot of my suburban life seriously, but that was inextricably mingled with a growing consciousness of the larger brutalities of the world. Ethiopian children were starving on the evening news and genocide was mushrooming in Cambodia. Was I truly depressed or just awakening to the First Noble Truth of Buddhism, the insight that samsaric life is misery? My melancholy seemed like simple realism; if you weren't depressed, you obviously didn't know what was going on.

~ Tim Farrington

I have suffered from depression for most of my life. It is an illness.

~ Adam Ant

Why, when you have a mental disease, is it always considered an act of imagination? Why is it that every organ in your body can get sick and you get sympathy except the brain?

~ Ruby Wax

My pillow is as good as any oceanto drown in the nightmare of myself.I swam all the way here from the moon.

~ Casey Renee Kiser

I'll say it again - mental illness is a physical illness. You wouldn't consider going up to someone suffering from Alzheimers to yell, Come on, get with it, you remember where you left your keys? Let us shout it from the rooftops until everyone gets the message; depression has and nothing to do with having a bad day or being sad, it's a killer if not taken seriously.

~ Ruby Wax

It's an unfortunate word, 'depression', because the illness has nothing to do with feeling sad, sadness is on the human palette. Depression is a whole other beast. It's when your old personality has left town and been replaced by a block of cement with black tar oozing through your veins and mind. This is when you can't decide whether to get a manicure or jump off a cliff. It's all the same. When I was institutionalised I sat on a chair unable to move for three months, frozen in fear. To take a shower was inconceivable. What made it tolerable was while I was inside, I found my tribe - my people. They understood and unlike those who don't suffer, never get bored of you asking if it will ever go away? They can talk medication all hours, day and night; heaven to my ears.

~ Ruby Wax

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

~ Ruby Wax

Can you admit on here that you have an affliction for millions of other people to see? Then that is great and a huge step towards your recovery.

~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

This will sound strange, and yet I'm sure it was the point: it was a bit like being high. That, for me, anyway, had always been the attraction of drugs, to stop the brutal round of hypercritical thinking, to escape the ravages of an unoccupied mind cannibalizing itself.

~ Norah Vincent

That was the crux. You. Only you could work on you. Nobody could force you, and if you weren't ready, then you weren't ready, and no amount of open-armed encouragement was going to change that.

~ Norah Vincent

If I was lonely, if I was afraid of being alone, then why abandon myself? Why run to someone else looking to give myself the thing that only I could give? I wanted to escape myself because I felt empty, and the emptiness frightened me. But obviously, I was empty because I was always running out, running away. The only way to fill the emptiness was to remain, to take up residence in myself.

~ Norah Vincent

I was always asking myself why. Why am I feeling this? Thinking that if I knew the cause I could find the cure. But of course there was no reasonable why, at least not in the present. I was awash in an accumulation of past feelings and future dreads, all similar, at least as far as my brain was concerned, and so, lumped together as one. But nobody can handle a lifetime of experience in one moment. That's why depression crushes you.

~ Norah Vincent

Despair was strength. Despair was the scab and the scar. The walled city in a time of plague. A closed fortification. A sure thing, because it was always safer, less painful to stop trying than it was to repeatedly try and fail. Failure-disappointment-was a poison in my blood. Despair was the antidote.

~ Norah Vincent

Happiness is not a reward. It's a consequence. You have to work at it every day.

~ Norah Vincent

I am not manic-just happy. It has been such a long time since I was happy. Please join me on my magic carpet for now.

~ Barbara Field Benziger

I'm not manic-just happy. It has been such a long time since I was happy. Please join me on my magic carpet for now.

~ Barbara Field Benziger

Preaching a man a sermon with a broken head and telling him to be right with God is equal to telling a man with a broken leg to get up and run a race.

~ Richard Baxter

Slowly, inch by inch, I felt myself recovering. After a few weeks, the darkness began to recede; my appetite for life returned. Haven was wonderful; she understood and nursed me through these weeks until I felt strong enough to go out in public, to get on my bike again.

~ Tyler Hamilton

We got through it. Haven made excuses for me to friends, and made an appointment with a terrific doctor, who put me on Effexor, 150 milligrams a day, enough to get my brain straightened out.

~ Tyler Hamilton

What to do with life? Get out of bed, Derek. That’s what you do. You get out of bed, and you get yourself a cup of fucking coffee. That’s all you can do.

~ Allie Burke

It is in my head! That's why it's called Mental Illness.

~ Roni Askey-Doran