Invisible Illness Stigma Quotes

He said that my problem was that I was perfectly healthy and had the illusion that I would be able bodied forever. I could only begin understanding his problem if I gave up that illusion and that would be very difficult, given how healthy I was. I understand, I mistakenly said, and he said no you don't. ~ James C. Coyne

Self-stigma can be just a big a problem as the negative attitudes of others. ~ Megan A. Arroll

There are cancers so insidious in their nature that their very pulsation is invisible. Such cancers leave the ivory whiteness of the skin untouched, and marble not the firm, fair flesh, with their blue tints; the physician who bends over the patient's chest hears not, through he listens, the insatiable teeth of the disease grinding its onward progress through the muscles, as the blood flows freely on; the knife has never been able to destroy, and rarely even, temporarily, to discern the rage of these mortal scourges; their home is in the mind, which they corrupt; they fill the whole heart until it breaks. Such, madame, are the cancers, fatal to queens; are you, too, free from their scourge? ~ Alexandre Dumas

Stigmas speak to the idea of difference and how difference shames us and those we know. ~ Michael Lewis

You're surrounded by people and voices and noises, but there you are, alone and trembling inside. And you want to be invisible. (thinking) Please, don't notice me. ~ Kellie Elmore

No one ever expects a man missing his limbs to perform the same as a whole person in normal society. Why do we expect the mentally unwell to perform equally to those without the handicap? ~ Aaron Daniel Behr

Mental health is an important topic, and should be discussed more frequently. It's not "attention seeking. ~ Brien Blatt

Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, but stigma and bias shame us all. ~ Bill Clinton

Any time I let it, the weight of living creeps in and starts to drag her down. It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored. People talk to her, but it feels like they are outside a house, talking through the walls. There are friends, but they are people to spend time with, not people to share time with. There's a false beast that takes the form of instinct and harps on the pointlessness of everything that happens. ~ David Levithan

Unlike 'mere' medical or physical disorders, mental disorders are not just problems. If successfully navigated, they can also present opportunities. Simply acknowledging this can empower people to heal themselves and, much more than that, to grow from their experiences. ~ Neel Burton

In talking with people that have experienced it, I learned that PTSD is something that a person in a position of authority sometimes thinks they're not supposed to have. They don't always have an avenue to personally address it or even discuss it. ~ Stana Katic

No one would ever tell a cancer patient to 'just get over it.' Why people think they can tell those with a mental illness as much is baffling. ~ Sara Ella

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

I will be living with chronic pain for the rest of my life. I don't have the mobility, energy or life options I used to have. I work hard to manage the pain, and I want the medical system to be a respectful and effective partner, not a jailer. The opioid crisis is not my doing. ~ Sonya Huber

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

Living with long-term suffering in American culture feels like being off-key. Suffering quiets and slows, but our culture prefers a crescendo. ~ K.J. Ramsey

The fear that other people in very scary occasions, reserved only for when they jump out of a plane or hear a strange noise in the middle of the night - that's my normal. ... It's invisible, it's irrational, it's never-ending ~ Jen Wilde

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

Telling a person who is depressed to have positive thoughts is the same as telling a sick person not to be sick. It doesn't work. ~ Yong Kang Chan

Sure, society understands visible shackles-- they get the symbolism of the wheelchair, of prosthetics, of a bumper sticker reading disabled veteran, but they still struggle for comprehension of the profound, invisible shackles that an illness such as [Chronic Fatigue] puts on a person's body. ~ Peggy Munson

Severe mental illness has been likened to drug addiction, prostitution, and criminality (37,38). Unlike physical disabilities, persons with mental illness are perceived by the public to be in control of their disabilities and responsible for causing them (34,36). Furthermore, research respondents are less likely to pity persons with mental illness, instead reacting to psychiatric disability with anger and believing that help is not deserved (35,36,39).
Understanding the impact of stigma on people with mental illness. World Psychiatry. Feb 2002; 1(1): 16–20.
PMCID: PMC1489832
PATRICK W. CORRIGAN and AMY C. WATSON ~ Matthew W. Corrigan

The general public is bewildered and fascinated by Multiple Personality Disorder/Dissociative Identity Disorder. Through books, television and movies, a distorted view of MPD/DID is often presented. While it may make for good entertainment, it fails to truly present the depth and intensity of the inherent trauma. Outside the ordinary day-to-day life experience of most people, it is hard to understand. ~ David Yeung

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

We are stronger than stigma, but until more celebrity role models openly discuss mental illness we will still be stereotyped as less than capable, by an upside down world that thinks reality television is actually normal behavior. ~ Shannon L. Alder

I want to get away from the stigma they all clearly feel just because they have an illness of the mind as opposed to, say, an illness of the lungs or blood. I want to get away from all the labels. "I'm OCD," "I'm depressed," "I'm a cutter," they say, like these are the things that define them. ~ Jennifer Niven

Even with all that - excellent treatment, wonderful family and friends, supportive work environment - I did not make my illness public until relatively late in life, and that's because the stigma against mental illness is so powerful that I didn't feel safe with people knowing. If you hear nothing else today, please hear this: There are not 'schizophrenics'. There are people with schizophrenia, and these people may be your spouse, they may be your child, they may be your neighbor, they may be your friend, they may be your coworker. ~ Elyn Saks

~~You are not alone~~ No, really. Literally. Maybe you have always known (or suspected) this. Maybe this news is shocking, baffling, dismaying, even unbelievable to you. Despite what you might believe or may have been told about yourself, you are not just 'moody'. Nor are you crazy or defective or possessed. You have what is commonly called 'multiple personalities'. ~ A.T.W.

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

Holding one's self responsible is a critical feature in stigma and in the generation of shame since violation of standards, rules, and goals are insufficient in its elicitation unless responsibility can be placed on the self. Stigma may differ from other elicitors of shame and guilt, in part because it is a social appearance factor. The degree to which the stigma is socially apparent is the degree to which one must negotiate the issue of blame, not only for one's self but between one's self and the other who is witness to the stigma. Stigmatization is a much more powerful elicitor of shame and guilt in that it requires a negotiation not only between one's self and one's attributions, but between one's self and the attributions of others. ~ Michael Lewis

I have a soft spot in my heart for suicidal people. I know that others make presumptions about suicidal people, painting them with the darkest of paints; but the way that I see it, these are people who look out into the world and see how broken it is and they look into their lives and they remember all the people they've hurt and then they look into themselves and they are faced with how ruined they are and they think that if they can't make anything really better then they just shouldn't exist anymore. It's not a form of selfishness or mental illness. It's a form of extreme state of empathy and selflessness. Suicidal people really are the best kinds of people. But they need to know that this world has a place for them, that this world needs the kind of light that they carry with them as they walk through it, they need to know that they have a home. That their type of darkness is like the darkness of the universe: it's the type of darkness from whence comes forth the light! Some people are just okay with everything, they don't feel the pain and the guilt that comes with the way that this world is. And I don't think that the lack of feeling makes anybody healthier in the mind. Our world is sick. And some people know that. These are not the sick people, these are the beautiful creatures! ~ C. JoyBell C.

Been under treatment for PTSD and bipolar since 1992. I'm not ashamed of my illness. I've been shunned by many and I feel for those shunned, too. ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

As a child I had been quiet and invisible when troubled; as an adult, I had hidden my mental illness behind an elaborate construction of laughter and work and dissembling. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

No one wants to admit that they suffer from a mental illness, because of the stigma," I said. "Both of us suffer from major depression. He knows that I've been through a lot of the same things that he's going through now. ~ Patrick J. Kennedy

He has so little energy in his body that he can only walk to the bathroom on the other side of the hallway twice a day.

After a few meters he is worn out, much worse than after the marathons he used to run. He was a triathlete, he earned a brown belt in judo, became Dutch champion in hockey, until he contracted pneumonia in 2005 and never recovered. Ever since, he has a headache, vertigo, and insomnia, but worst of all the fatigue: after minimal effort his muscles would lose all their strength and take days to recover. Only after a few years did he get a diagnosis: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). ~ Ellen De Visser

I think the stigma attached to mental illness will disappear just like it did for cancer years ago. ~ Sally Graham

The best friend that I ever had was invisible. ~ Steven Magee

There's nothing worse than bottling something up inside and letting it eat at you. It's like being shot, and leaving the bullet inside our bodies. The wound would never heal. Instead, we need to let it out. ~ S.R. Crawford

I was shocked and terrified to hear Dr. Summer say I had what was formerly known as multiple personality disorder. Is that like Sybil? Am I like the woman in The Three Faces of Eve? My head began to spin. What do I have inside of me? Is there a crazy person in there? What am I? I felt like a freak. I was afraid to have anyone know. I have a mental illness. People make fun of people like me. Upon hearing my diagnosis, I stopped thinking of myself as smart, creative, or clever. Even though Dr. Summer had worked hard to help me understand that I had developed an amazingly adaptive survival technique, I no longer thought of it that way at all.

I was overwhelmed by fear and shame. The words multiple personality disorder echoed in my mind. I thought of all the ways people with multiple personalities were ridiculed and marginalized: They're locked away in mental institutions. They are really sick. I'm not going to be the subject of people's jokes. I am a lawyer. I work at the U.S. Department of Justice. The more I thought about it, the deeper my despair grew. ~ Olga Trujillo

My story is not a sad story; it's a real one. It's a story about a girl who fought through a storm she thought would never end. ~ Hannah Blum

Even more than the depression, it was my anxiety and agitation that became the defining symptoms of my illness. Like epileptic seizures, a series of frenzied anxiety attacks would descend upon me without warning. My body was possessed by a chaotic, demonic force which led to my shaking, pacing and violently hitting myself across the chest or in the head. This self-flagellation seemed to provide a physical outlet for my invisible torment, as if I were letting steam out of a pressure cooker. ~ Douglas Bloch

The drug I take is called schizophrenia, among other labels, which I desperately want to put away. I want to put the drug of schizophrenia down, and I want to put down the stigma surrounding its label. ~ Jonathan Harnisch

self-stigma is not a person's fault; nor is it a part of the person's illness!
If the public did not hold negative and stigmatizing attitudes in the first place, these would never have become internalized, causing people the painful and disabling experience of self-stigma. ~ Patrick W. Corrigan