Mental Illness Quotes

While she is still hospitalised, I take Emma out for strengthening walks, for her muscles and been under-used for a long time. She is sometimes breathless, I notice with concern, and there are other changes in her, either through a nerve her therapy touches, or through her illness, or both, which make her, quite often, disagreeable to be with.

~ Carol Lee

The reasons for Emma's illness and for her decision to allow life in, rather than die, are intertwined and involve the beginnings of her feelings of belonging, of safety and of competence to be in the world.

~ Carol Lee

Someone said once that they'd never heard of a crime they couldn't imagine committing, and I realized then that if I had a daughter and she had a rabbit and that rabbit was alone with me and I was feeling the way I felt right now and I had a way to kill that rabbit and the time to spend killing that rabbit then killing the rabbit was something I could imagine myself possibly doing or at least considering doing or being on the edge of doing. And smearing a husband with the blood wasn't such a far step after that if you had a desire to smear your husband with blood and smearing someone with blood was something I could imagine a situation calling for because there were at least a few people in this world that I wouldn't not like to see smeared with blood—one person being Werner for fucking my plans, for sending me back out into a life with my wildebeest, to figure out a way to live here and I didn't want to do that and I didn't know how to do that and I wasn't sure how I was going to do that—

~ Catherine Lacey

Every few minutes or so I would remember the look from the man who had wanted fifty cents, and I'd look at that framed memory hanging in myself and it meant I was here, back in this sick city, but in other ways I was not here at all and anyone who looked closely could see that I had nothing to give, that I was a junk drawer, a collection of things that may or may not have had a use.

~ Catherine Lacey

Your EGO feeds on the volume of the mental clutter, the greater the intensity the more crystallized is your EGO. Man dominates and exherts his mental superiority over others. Be Aware! Stop Mental Clutter, Kill EGO, Be YOU!

~ Ramana Pemmaraju

What's going on? I'm in the back car of a roller coaster at the top of the climb, with the front rows already giving themselves over to gravity. I can hear those front riders screaming and know my own scream is only seconds away. I'm at the moment you hear the landing gear of a plane grind loudly into place, in that instant before your rational mind tells you it's just the landing gear. I'm leaping off a cliff only to discover I can fly... and then realizing there's nowhere to land. Ever. That's what's going on.

~ Neal Shusterman

And you know the darkness beyond despair, just as intimately as you know the soaring heights. Because in this and all universes, there is balance. You can't have the one without facing the other. And sometimes you think you can take it because the joy is worth the despair, and sometimes you know you can't take it and how did you ever think you could? And there is the dance; strength and weakness, confidence and desolation.

~ Neal Shusterman

You see demons in the eyes of the world, and the world sees bottomless pit in yours.

~ Neal Shusterman

I suppose even a simple slogan can be twisted into whatever shape we want, like a balloon animal—we can even make it loop back around on itself, becoming a noose. In the end, the measure of who we are can be seen in the shapes of our balloon animals.

~ Neal Shusterman

I knew you were in charge of me but my mind broke on its own.

~ Alice Notley

Narcissists often feign oppression because narcissists always feel entitled.

~ Criss Jami

Really, the only people you should be comparing yourself to would be people who make you feel better by comparison. For instance, people who are in comas, because those people have no spoons at all and you don't see anyone judging them. Personally, I always compare myself to Galileo because everyone knows he's fantastic, but he has no spoons at all because he's dead. So technically I'm better than Galileo because all I've done is take a shower and already I've accomplished more than him today.

~ Jenny Lawson

Sometimes, when you want to help a broken person, your attempts only remind them of their missing pieces.

~ Gaia B. Amman

To actually accept that you have an eating disorder or a mental health issue is actually a sign of great, great strength. It is not a sign of weakness at all.

~ Nigel Owens

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

The stigma of mental illness is first and foremost a social justice issue!

~ Patrick W. Corrigan

Suddenly, I’m lighter, only half of who I was.

~ Shannon Mullen

The west coast is a mecca for wild hearts, wild minds, wild spirits and I’m a WMD—I’ve got so much energy I’m about to explode.

~ Shannon Mullen

My mind feels like a race car on the track, getting faster and faster every time I pause to think or blink or try to focus on anything. Nothing can keep up to it, not the other cars, not my body, not anyone else in the bar. It’s a rush, pure exhilaration, and I’m having the time of my life. But instead of driving, I’m in the passenger seat, along for the ride, watching myself race around the track from my barstool.

~ Shannon Mullen

The forest is blanketed by the greenest ferns and moss and bonsai-like trees, a wild majesty that beckons hobbits and pixies and elves and dreamers.

~ Shannon Mullen

Self-stigma refers to the state in which a person with mental illness has come to internalize the negative attitudes about mental illness and turns them against him- or herself.

~ Patrick W. Corrigan

I found it hard to write the bits where the things that were at first surprising or even shocking became normal incrementally until I couldn't see that they were anything but normal, because everything else had shifted just one centimetre here and one centimetre there, moving at the speed fingernails grow, until finally everything just clicked into exactly the wrong place.

~ Olivia Sudjic

her eyes are unfathomable to me, hostile, even, as if she had removed herself to a place where I cannot reach her - somewhere I cannot know.

~ Carol Lee

At the root of this dilemma is the way we view mental health in this country. Whether an illness affects your heart, your leg or your brain, it’s still an illness, and there should be no distraction.– Michelle Obama

~ Michelle Obama

When mental [illness] increases until it reaches the danger point, do not exhaust yourself by efforts to trace back to original causes. Better accept them as inevitable and save your strength to fight against the effects.

~ George Sand

Sometimes healthy and whole people make you long for your old, 'undepressed' self, and it is hard to smile when you just feel like sobbing your heart out. People are going out, you aren't. People are vacationing, you aren't. They are getting ahead in their careers, you aren't. They are partying, you aren't. Socializing reminds you of everything you have lost to depression.

~ Shubhrata Prakash

I've learned to be comforted in the dark spot of my mind.

~ Lisa M. Cronkhite

She fails to see who I am, even, for her eyes do not, will not, take me in. Instead they transmit a powerful message. She is like a billboard flashing, starkly: 'Keep Out'.

~ Carol Lee

I was back in disgust. I stood in the centre of the big room, naked, letting the heat strike me from the three points of heat, and I knew, and it was an illumination — one of those things one has always known, but never really understood before — that all sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under flesh. If this goes, then the conviction of life goes too. But I could feel none of this. The texture of the carpet was abhorrent to me, a dead processed thing; my body was a thin, meagre, spiky sort of vegetable, like an unsunned plant; and when I touched the hair on my head it was dead. I felt the floor bulge up under me. The walls were losing their density. I knew I was moving down into a new dimension, further away from sanity than I had ever been. I knew I had to get to the bed fast. I could not walk, so I let myself down on my hands and knees and crawled to the bed and lay on it, covering myself.

~ Doris Lessing

Understand ... I don't hate her, I hate what she's become. I hate her illness.

~ Joseph Stefano

She had spells of manic loquaciousness, followed by days of silence.

~ Elizabeth Strout

Schizo. It didn't matter how many times Dr. Gill compared it to a disease or physical disability, it wasn't the same thing. It just wasn't. I had schizophrenia. If I saw two guys on the sidewalk, one in a wheelchair and one talking talking to himself, which would I rush to open a door for, and which would I cross the road to avoid?

~ Kelley Armstrong

Office Peone looked at John and wondered what mental illness he had. The Seattle streets were filled with the mostly-crazy, half-crazy, nearly crazy, and soon-to-be crazy. Indian, white, Chicano, Asian, men, women, children. The social workers did not have anywhere near enough money, training, or time to help them. The city government hated the crazies because they were a threat to the public image of the urban core. Private citizens ignored them at all times of the year except the few charitable days leading up to and following Christmas. In the end, the police had to do most of the work. Police did crisis counseling, transporting them howling to detox, the dangerous to jail, racing the sick to the hospitals, to a safer place. At the academy, Officer Peone figured he would be fighting bad guys. He did not imagine he would spend most of his time taking care of the refuse of the world. Peone found it easier when the refuse were all nuts or dumb-ass drunks, harder when they were just regular folks struggling to find their way off the streets.

~ Sherman Alexie

There are a couple of reasons why I take comfort in being able to put all this in my own vernacular and present it to you. For one thing, because then I'm not completely alone with it. And for another, it gives me a sense of being in control of the craziness. Now this is a delusion, but it's MY delusion and I'm sticking with it. It's sort of like: I have problems but problems don't have me.

~ Carrie Fisher

A panic attack is pathological exaggeration of the body’s normal response to fear, stress or excitement.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Sometimes it's as if I can shrink away to nothing. Sometimes I feel as pure and perfect as a ghost. The hunger, the headaches, the dizziness—these are the only things that are real.

~ J.p. Delaney

I have a mental illness, but that doesn't stop me from being mentally capable.

~ Lisa M. Cronkhite

It’s hard to imagine a more squarely on-the-nose example of demonizing mental illness than portraying a mentally ill man as a literal demon.

~ Charles Bramesco

But I know that if I don't at least try, I'll stay the way I am till it kills me. Till I kill me, I mean. I never really accept that that's what I'm doing - I say it, but I don't believe it.

~ Deborah Hautzig

Mental health is usually the last place people go when they think about someone being sick.

~ Louise Gornall