Mental Health Professionals Quotes

But that is what these people do - the Steves of this world - they all try and make something out of nothing. and they all do it for themselves. ~ Nathan Filer

Living with multiple personalities is not something you just wake up fully understanding. For months, maybe years after I first accepted the diagnosis, I was still discovering new nuances, fresh areas I hadn't considered. ~ Kim Noble

Ritualised child sexual abuse is about abuse of power, control and secrecy. Ten years ago many people found it difficult to believe that fathers actually raped their children, yet survivors of such abuses spoke out and eventually began to be listened to and believed. Ritual abuse survivors, when they try to speak out about their experiences, face denial and disbelief from society and often fear for their lives from the abusers. ~ Laurie Matthew

Somehow the disorder hooks into all kinds of fears and insecurities in many clinicians. The flamboyance of the multiple, her intelligence and ability to conceptualize the disorder, coupled with suicidal impulses of various orders of seriousness, all seem to mask for many therapists the underlying pain, dependency, and need that are very much part of the process. In many ways, a professional dealing with a multiple in crisis is in the same position as a parent dealing with a two-year-old or with an adolescent's acting-out behavior. (236) ~ Lynn I. Wilson

Most mental health professionals, including clinicians and researchers, endorse the deficit theory. They're convinced that we wage war simply because we don't know how to make love. We desperately want loving, satisfying relationships but lack the skills we need to develop them. ~ David D. Burns

It is easy for us to delude ourselves into thinking that our notions of the healthy person are unbiased by our particular circumstances or partialities. It is comforting for us to think that, in totalitarian societies, where troublesome people are often psychiatrically hospitalized, the indigenous mental health professionals are themselves aware that their behavior is nakedly political and actually aimed at social control rather than the health of the person. Bus what is the possibility that American mental health workers are themselves vulnerable to what amounts to the goals of adjustment couched in notions of health, and which lead to equal - and probably equally unwitting - exercises of social control? ~ Robert Kegan

The worst feeling in the world is not losing your friend forever, but rather having patronizing people tell you that the love you have for your friend and the connection and emotion you have towards them is an illness to be cured, a problem to be covered up and hidden away by the power of mood-altering drugs. I used to trust doctors when I was younger... now I've lost my trust in all mental health professionals forever. ~ Rebecca McNutt

Stigma against mental illness is a scourge with many faces, and the medical community wears a number of those faces. ~ Elyn R. Saks

A mental illness diagnosis does not automatically sentence you to a bleak and painful life, devoid of pleasure or joy or accomplishment. I also wanted to dispel the myths held by many mental-health professionals themselves - that people with a significant thought disorder cannot live independently, cannot work at challenging jobs, cannot have true friendships, cannot be in meaningful, sexually satisfying love relationships, cannot lead lives of intellectual, spiritual, or emotional richness. ~ Elyn R. Saks

We're at this really unique time, I think, in trans representation in popular culture where homelessness, depression, mental health issues, instability-in-general are still so very real and need to be talked about, but we're aware that they've dominated "trans" stories for years and years.

And we're now finally at a place where we're seeing some really positive representations of trans folks in pop culture, and there's this new pressure -- at least, I feel it, within trans and trans-ally communities -- to only focus on the positive. Because we're trying, in some sense, to overcompensate for the years and years of too much negativity. As a writer, you might feel a pressure to push the negative stuff away. But there are consequences for that too. Anyone who's working with trans characters right now is going to have to reconcile that tension. ~ Mitch Kellaway

Beautiful things have been broken before… ~ S.R. Crawford

You are a word doctor. Repair the breaches of the soul. Rebuild the broken walls of the personality. Comfort those who have lost their hearts. Speak words that contain life, power, and health. Use your tongue as a weapon to destroy the mental strongholds in people's lives. ~ Ivan Tait

You can't patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid. ~ Michael Connelly

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste. ~ Paul Romer

And isn't that how you become tender, vulnerable? The tissue-softening marination of your own mind, the quicksand of mental indulgence? ~ Carmen Maria Machado

It's the thing I struggle with every day: the mental diligence and stamina needed to sit in front of the computer, open the file, start writing and to keep doing so, word after word, until I've created the next story. A combination of learning disability and chronic health issues make that the hardest thing for me. ~ Nalo Hopkinson

Suicide and mental health problems have no boundaries. ~ Santosh Kalwar

We have some very suggestive evidence that the use of pesticides and herbicides affects our mental function and brain physiology, including increasing the incidence of Parkinson's disease up to seven times in those most heavily exposed to them. This is not exactly a surprise when we realize that pesticides are designed to be neurotoxic to the pests. ~ Gabriel Cousens M.D.

Another statistical survey, of 7,948 students at forty-eight colleges, was conducted by social scientists from Johns Hopkins University. Their preliminary report is part of a two-year study sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health. Asked what they considered "very important" to them now, 16 percent of the students checked "making a lot of money"; 78 percent said their first goal was "finding a purpose and meaning to my life. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

His mind betrayed him and now we were all victims of the horrible deception. ~ Maddy Kobar

A man who under the influence of mental pain or unbearably oppressive suffering sends a bullet through his own head is called a suicide; but for those who give freedom to their pitiful, soul-debasing passions in the holy days of spring and youth there is no name in man's vocabulary. After the bullet follows the peace of the grave: ruined youth is followed by years of grief and painful recollections. He who has profaned his spring will understand the present condition of my soul. I am not yet old, or grey, but I no longer live. Psychiaters tell us that a solider, who was wounded at Waterloo, went mad, and afterwards assured everybody - and believed it himself - that he had died at Waterloo, and that what was now considered to be him was only his shadow, a reflection of the past. I am now experiencing something resembling this semi-death.. ~ Anton Chekhov

Young people rely on the Internet and its unlimited supply of pornography to ward off external stress. The instant gratification gratifies instantly. But the external stress is, in large part, being caused by the Internet itself. The Internet itself is a feedback loop; it creates the demand that it then seeks to fill. ~ A.N. Turner

I'm sorry I'm young," Deborah answered with a bitterness that was half prose. "We have a right to be as crazy as anyone else."
The second part was more a plea, and to her surprise the superbly inhuman fighter smiled softly and said, "Yes ... I suppose that's true, though I never thought of it in those terms before. ~ Joanne Greenberg

I want to show that the dividing lines between sanity and mental illness have been drawn in the wrong place. ~ Anthony Storr

Counting calories is not the answer, because eating is not the problem. ~ Anita Johnston

We are particularly interested in the mental health programs and policies that support our troops and their families before, during, and after deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. ~ John M. McHugh

It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word 'beautiful', alludes to a state that, on a psychological level, we can describe as mental health or happiness. Like buildings, we, too, contain opposites which can be more or less successfully handled. ~ Alain De Botton

Sometimes the people around you won't understand your journey. They don't need to, it's not for them. ~ Joubert Botha

I want to go up to the closest white person and say: 'You can't understand this, it's a black thing' and then slap him, just for my mental health. ~ Charles Barron

There are no free and democratic and wealthy countries in the world that have US rate of gun violence. We have to worry about loners and alienated people. We have to do better on mental health. ~ David Brooks

1 in 5 people have dandruff. 1 in 4 people have mental health problems. I've had both. ~ Ruby Wax

This is a little dirty secret of mental health economics: if you're depressed, you don't think you're worth the cost of treatment. You feel guilty enough about being unproductive and unreliable. ~ Richard O'Connor

Beauty or meaning is not intrinsic too suffering. But if you can take the suffering and find the parts that are funny or profound, you can curate your world into something that might be entertaining for someone for a while. Eventually, maybe, that time will have been useful. More useful than, like, working in a bank. ~ Jade Sharma

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

The hidden strength is too deep a secret. But in the end ... in the end it is our only ally. ~ Joanne Greenberg

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

What would we happen if we reframed the way we understand black male life in a way that took mental health seriously? If we looked outside and didn't see ruthless gangbangers, but teenage boys left hopeless and giving themselves suicide missions. If instead of chastising young men for fighting over sneakers we asked why they felt worthless and unseen without them. If we didn't label them junkies, but rather recognized their need for affirmation. ~ Mychal Denzel Smith

Solomon had good days and he had bad days, but the good had far outnumbered the bad since Lisa and Clark had started coming around. Sometimes, though, they'd show up and he's look completely exhausted, drained of all his charm and moving in slow motion. They could do that to him - the attacks. Something about the physical response to panic can drain all the energy out of a person, and it doesn't matter what causes it or how long it lasts. What Solomon had was unforgiving and sneaky and as smart as any other illness. It was like a virus or cancer that would hide just long enough to fool him into thinking it was gone. And because it showed up when it damn well pleased, he'd learned to be honest about it, knowing that embarrassment only made it worse. ~ John Corey Whaley

I have had moments where I've had mental-health issues and I've felt like yoga and meditating and reading these Buddhist self-help books actually really help. ~ Mike White

The problem with medicine and the institutions it has spawned for the care of the sick and the old is not that they have had an incorrect view of what makes life significant. The problem is that they have had almost no view at all. Medicine's focus is narrow. Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet - and this is the painful paradox - we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days. ~ Atul Gawande

As you may already know, post-traumatic stress disorder is extremely complex. Each client has a unique, perhaps virtually unbelievable, set of experiences, and an almost equally set of reactions to those experiences. ~ Aphrodite Matsakis

Happiness isn't something you work toward, the same way misery isn't something you work toward. ~ Brent Jones

True emotional healing doesn't happen without feeling. The only way out is through. ~ Jessica Moore

Make sure your priorities line up with your values. ~ Michael Barbarulo

Mind over matter represents the triumph of will over physical hindrance. Our thoughts are our weapon against the world. ~ David Adam

A major challenge of this movement is to do the work that will create more humane, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system. How, then, do we accomplish this balancing act of passionately attending to the needs of prisoners- calling for less violent conditions, an end to state sexual assault, improved physical and mental health care, greater access to drug programs, better educational work opportunities, unionization of prison labor, more connections with families and communities, shorter or alternative sentencing- and at the same time call for alternatives to sentencing altogether, no more prison construction, and abolitionist strategies that question the place of prison in our future? ~ Angela Y. Davis

I've got to that point in life when there's very few thrills and lots of pills seems we all end up this way. As we wait for our final day. But there's one thing about the pills I take. My manic episodes have taken a break ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

We should commit ourselves to 'eucharistic coherence,' that is, we should be conscious that people cannot receive holy communion and at the same time act or speak against the commandments, in particular when abortions, euthanasia, and other serious crimes against life and family are facilitated. This responsibility applies particularly to legislators, governors, and health professionals. ~ Pope Francis

In modern society, it is not enough to be an engineer, a doctor, a chemist, a biologist, or a physicist, you must be all of them to understand why human health is failing on such a massive scale. ~ Steven Magee

It is the uninformed that willfully put a cellphone next to their brains. ~ Steven Magee

I can't answer you in a nutshell. We wouldn't fit unless we saw the same shrink. ~ Brian Spellman

See, you've got to understand, son. There's two types of guys in this world. There's guys . . . who think they're in control, and guys like us who live in the moment. Who accept life as it is. ~ Brent Jones