Mental Illness Coping Quotes

Rough week, right?

Listen, every book in your home is one of us saying to you, please hold on until the end. We want you to stay with us so we can all see, together, how it all turns out. You're not alone. One of us is with you all the time. Hold on tight. See you next week. ~ Warren Ellis

I am working on getting to know people, but I have issues with that because I am afraid of betrayal. I am a work in progress. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

And at times I murmured the token phrase to the doctor, 'When can I go home?' knowing that home was the place where I least desired to be. There they would watch me for signs of abnormality, like ferrets around a rabbit burrow waiting for the rabbit to appear. ~ Janet Frame

I am a warrior, strong-willed and have a lot of perseverance. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

I don't think people talk about mental illness a lot, but they need to know it's OK to talk about how they are feeling. People are afraid of telling the truth because they think it's going to hurt everyone around them. I've kept so much inside that I've literally lost it. I wish more people would get help when they feel like they need it
not just to look to medicine, but to the support of others. ~ Michael Angelakos

One began by finding mental illness mystifying, and ended by being still more mystified by health. ~ Pat Barker

It all made sense - terrible sense. The panic she had experienced in the warehouse district because of not knowing what had happened had been superseded at the newsstand by the even greater panic of partial knowledge. And now the torment of partly knowing had yielded to the infinitely greater terror of knowing precisely ~ Flora Rheta Schreiber

Taking care of the elderly comes without the vast literature of advice and encouragement that accompanies other kinds of commitments, notably romantic love and childbearing. It sneaks up on you as something that is not supposed to happen, or rather you crash into this condition that you have not been warned about, a rocky coast not on the map. In the preferred stories the last years of life are golden and the old all ripen into wisdom, not decay into diseases that mimic mental illness and roll backward into chaotic childhood and beyond. ~ Rebecca Solnit

The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance. ~ Frank Herbert

They (...) call what I have an invisible illness, but I often wonder if they're really looking. Beyond the science stuff. It doesn't bleed or swell, itch or crack, but I see it, right there on my face. It's like decay, this icky green colour, as if my life were being filmed through a grey filter. I lack light, am an entire surface area that the sun can't touch. ~ Louise Gornall

I felt held hostage by her illness and by the backward mental health system that once again was incapable of helping our family in crisis. ~ Mira Bartok

But what happens if such a patient, say myself, for instance, has rarely if ever experienced a normal state of functioning? What happens if such a patient has spent much of her life in mental hospitals, both pursuing and being pursued by one's illness after another? What happens if "regular life" to such a person has always meant cutting one's arms, or gagging? ~ Lauren Slater

Soon I find myself squatting on the floor. I am still striking my face; not with my fists this time, but with wide-open hands. I am slapping myself. The sounds I make when my palms meet my cheeks are like an unrelenting round of applause. I am clapping myself. Or clapping for myself. I start to giggle.

All the voices are receding now. I am no longer filled with rage or disappointment. I clap and clap and simply cannot stop. ~ Cyril Wong

Forgive me," I wrote at the bottom. "I did not think I would break. ~ Claire North

I was the outsider in Fernhall House, but they were all outsiders really. Outside society. Outside time. You hear people say that those in asylums and care facilities are out of their minds. But in truth their minds are often the one thing they are not out of. Their whole being is sheltering behind walls of muscle and bone. Everything they are - and are not - exists within their sacrosanct headspace. ~ Jonathan Lee

Being the people we are, and feeling the way that we do, getting excited about going somewhere new can be terrifying. Of course it is, I get it! But if you don't travel, you'll regret it. Your soul will forever be empty. ~ S.R. Crawford

Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, or the arts are clearly of an atrabilious temperament and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile? ~ Aristotle.

People who live with mental illnesses are among the most stigmatized groups in society.
Fighting the stigma caused by mental disorders: past perspectives, present activities, and future directions. World Psychiatry. Oct 2008; 7(3): 185–188. PMCID: PMC2559930 ~ Heather Stuart

This is glorious!' I cried, and then i looked at the sinner by my side. He sat with his head sunk on his breast and said 'Yes', without raising his eyes, as if afraid to see writ large on the clear sky of the offing the reproach of his romantic conscience. ~ Joseph Conrad

It's time for a change. You have to loosen up and live life. Better yet, enjoy life. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

Fuck 'em. They don't know what you know.' And it's true. None of these people know what we know. ~ Marie Marquardt

I never want to be known. I'd rather be alone than have everyone talk about me and bother about my life. That's why I want to be an astronaut. I just want to travel into space and stay there. Be somewhere where no one else goes. ~ Aimee Herman

The Pythagoreans, you have to remember, were extremely weird. Their philosophy was a chunky stew of things we'd now call mathematics, things we'd now call religion, and things we'd now call mental illness. ~ Jordan Ellenberg

This system that has been created for us, stifles the mind, thus why some suffer from mental illness; especially those who internalize their condition. To hold back a fluid being from mental development is asking for trouble. In anticipation of this, the creators of this chaotic system, thought to create a response to such a breakdown, and when society began to display such behaviors, they created mental illness diagnoses, so as to ensure that blame could be placed on the individual for their behavior. You cannot blame someone who might have developed into someone great, for the break down of their mental constitution; it's to be expected in such a system as we have. ~ Dara Reidyr

It is a technique ideally suited to prevent physical and mental illness and to protect the body generally, developing an inevitable sense of self-reliance and assurance. ~ Yehudi Menuhin

For the most part, mental illness is caused by an absence of or defect in the love that a particular child required from its particular parents for successful maturation and spiritual growth. It ~ M. Scott Peck

My grandfather often felt frustrated or baffled by my grandmother's illness, but when it came to the origins of the Skinless Horse he thought he understood. The Skinless Horse was a creature sworn to pursue my grandmother no matter where she went on the face of the globe, whispering to her in the foulest terms of her crimes and the blackness of her soul. There was a voice like that in everyone's head, he figured; in my grandmother's case it was just a matter of degree. You could almost see the Skinless Horse as a clever adapation, a strategy for survival evolved by a proven survivor. If you kept the voice inside your head, the way most people did, there could really be only one way to silence it. He admired the defiance, the refusal to surrender, involuntary but implicit in the act of moving that reproachful whisperer to a shadowy corner of a room, an iron furnace in a cellar, the branches of a grand old tree. ~ Michael Chabon

We have a dysfunctional dream of the planet, and humans are mentally sick with a disease called fear. The symptoms of the disease are all the emotions that make humans suffer: anger, hate, sadness, envy, and betrayal. When the fear is too great, the reasoning mind begins to fail, and we call this mental illness. ~ Miguel Ruiz

Humans are lamentably insecure creatures, and often they pick up their modern devices to alleviate that insecurity, in a subconscious attempt to receive some thrill and reward. And the longer we keep on practicing such habit, the more hooked we get to our devices, often to the point of losing our mental stability. So, devices that were mainly invented as means of communication have become weapons of mental devastation. ~ Abhijit Naskar

So often, we're told that women's stories are unimportant. After all, what does it matter what happens in the main room, in the kitchen, or in the bedroom? Who cares about the relationships between mother, daughter, and sister? A baby's illness, the sorrows and pains of childbirth, keeping the family together during war, poverty, or even in the best of days are considered small and insignificant compared with the stories of men, who fight against nature to grow their crops, who wage battles to secure their homelands, who struggle to look inward in search of the perfect man. We're told that men are strong and brave, but I think women know how to endure, accept defeat, and bear physical and mental agony much better than men. The men in my life - my father, Z.G., my husband, my father-in-law, my brother-in-law, and my son - faced, to one degree or another, those great male battles, but their hearts - so fragile - wilted, buckled, crippled, corrupted, broke, or shattered when confronted with the losses women face every day...Our men try to act strong, but it is May, Yen-yen, Joy, and I who must steady them and help them bear their pain, anguish, and shame. ~ Lisa See

Other pressing problems with the current medical model [of mental disorder] is that it encourages false epidemics, most glaringly in bipolar disorder and ADHD, and the wholesale exportation of Western mental disorders and Western accounts of mental disorder. Taken together, this is leading to a pandemic of Western disease categories and treatments, while undermining the variety and richness of the human experience. ~ Neel Burton

The point is, the brain talks to itself, and by talking to itself changes its perceptions. To make a new version of the not-entirely-false model, imagine the first interpreter as a foreign correspondent, reporting from the world. The world in this case means everything out- or inside our bodies, including serotonin levels in the brain. The second interpreter is a news analyst, who writes op-ed pieces. They read each other's work. One needs data, the other needs an overview; they influence each other. They get dialogues going.

INTERPRETER ONE: Pain in the left foot, back of heel.
INTERPRETER TWO: I believe that's because the shoe is too tight.
INTERPRETER ONE: Checked that. Took off the shoe. Foot still hurts.
INTERPRETER TWO: Did you look at it?
INTERPRETER ONE: Looking. It's red.
INTERPRETER TWO: No blood?
INTERPRETER ONE: Nope.
INTERPRETER TWO: Forget about it.
INTERPRETER ONE: Okay.

Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two.

An exemplary piece of confusion.

INTERPRETER ONE: There's a tiger in the corner.
INTERPRETER TWO: No, that's not a tiger- that's a bureau.
INTERPRETER ONE: It's a tiger, it's a tiger!
INTERPRETER TWO: Don't be ridiculous. Let's go look at it.

Then all the dendrites and neurons and serotonin levels and interpreters collect themselves and trot over to the corner.
If you are not crazy, the second inte ~ Susanna Kaysen

To some extent, sanity is a form of conformity. People are always selling the idea that people who have mental illness are suffering. But it's really not so simple. I think mental illness or madness can be an escape also. ~ John F. Nash