Mental Illness Discrimination Quotes

The fatal weakness of most psychiatric historiographies lies in the historians' failure to give sufficient weight to the role of coercion in psychiatry and to acknowledge that mad-doctoring had nothing to do with healing. ~ Thomas Szasz

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

A phenomenon that might seem only backwards or silly when expressed at a social level becomes madness at the individual level. ~ Caitlin R. Kiernan

I finally know how to love myself. I do not need anyone's approval or anyone to love me in order to love myself.

I am truly and wholeheartedly in love with myself - and I wouldn't have it any other way. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

The only time it's hopeless is when you're dead! Long as you're alive, you can get better - you can make it better. ~ RoAnna Sylver

Unconscious motivating forces play a central role in shaping our behavior, but they are also the primary cause of mental illness. ~ Christian Jarrett

Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood. ~ Alice Miller

Certain empty houses that seemed to stare like the faces of people suffering from terrible mental illness. An empty barn on the outskirts of town, the hayloft door swinging open and closed on rusty hinges, first disclosing darkness, then hiding it, then disclosing it again. ~ Stephen King

Your trials are for a reason - to experience, show and tell. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

You can do it! You can find the strength to carry this load. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

The medical profession's classic prescription for coping with such predicaments, Primum non nocere (First, do no harm), sounds better than it is. In fact, it fails to tell us precisely what we need to know: What is harm and what is help?
However, two things about the challenge of helping the helpless are clear. One is that, like beauty and ugliness, help and harm often lie in the eyes of the beholder
in our case, in the often divergently directed eyes of the benefactor and his beneficiary. The other is that harming people in the name of helping them is one of mankind's favorite pastimes. ~ Thomas Szasz

One of them hasn't got a uniform on or plainclothes either like the rest. He has on the white coat that is my nightmare and my horror. And in the crotch of one arm he is upending two long poles intertwined with canvas.
The long-drawn-out death within life. The burial-alive of the mind, covering it over with fresh graveyard earth each time it tries to struggle through to the light. In this kind of death you never finish dying.
("New York Blues") ~ Cornell Woolrich

Out of the fog of mental illness came enlightenment. ~ Steven Magee

I'm tired of dealing with crazies. When did it become my job to manage your mental illness? ~ Joan Rivers

Mental illness

People assume you aren't sick
unless they see the sickness on your skin
like scars forming a map of all the ways you're hurting.

My heart is a prison of Have you tried?s
Have you tried exercising? Have you tried eating better?
Have you tried not being sad, not being sick?
Have you tried being more like me?
Have you tried shutting up?

Yes, I have tried. Yes, I am still trying,
and yes, I am still sick.

Sometimes monsters are invisible, and
sometimes demons attack you from the inside.
Just because you cannot see the claws and the teeth
does not mean they aren't ripping through me.
Pain does not need to be seen to be felt.

Telling me there is no problem
won't solve the problem.

This is not how miracles are born.
This is not how sickness works. ~ Emm Roy

We shall therefore compare the concept of homosexuality as heresy, prevalent in the days of the witch-hunts, with the concept of homosexuality as mental illness, prevalent today. ~ Thomas Szasz

The brave men and women, who serve their country and as a result, live constantly with the war inside them, exist in a world of chaos. But the turmoil they experience isn't who they are; the PTSD invades their minds and bodies. ~ Robert Koger

Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the "divine madness," to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean. ~ Rollo May

Many so-called disorders of the mind are simply disorders of thought. ~ Vironika Tugaleva

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

We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will. ~ William Faulkner

Overthinking can lead to worrying which leads to anxiety. Anxiety can at times be crippling, leave people frozen and unable to act. Overthinking can also lead to depression. Either of these can leave you unable to focus, feeling hopeless, and irritable. ~ Brien Blatt

The only problem was, when your whole existence is something you have to cope with, you look back one day and find that your strategy has become a way of life. ~ Joanna Cannon

yet still I crave the sight of my own hypnotic gaze reflecting out at me from the shared mirror of anorexia and bulimia, number to life and reality, existing only in my self-made tortured state ~ Carol Lee

Romantic love is mental illness. But it's a pleasurable one. It's a drug. It distorts reality, and that's the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw. ~ Fran Lebowitz

Every lineament of the girl's wasted body is a testament to her inner turmoil. Willow can only imagine what kind of pain she must be in to destroy herself that way. She knows there's something ironic in her compassion for the other girl, but she can't help feeling that this utter mortification of the flesh is far worse than anything that she herself has done. ~ Julia Hoban

Things not to say to someone with mental illness: Ignore it. Forget about it. Fight it. You are better than this. You are over thinking. ~ Nitya Prakash

It's not the gun you should be scared of - it's the crazy man with the gun ~ Jennifer McMahon

If falling in love is not love, then what is it other than a temporary and partial collapse of ego boundaries? I do not know. But the sexual specificity of the phenomenon leads me to suspect that it is a genetically determined instinctual component of mating behavior. In other words, the temporary collapse of ego boundaries that constitutes falling in love is a stereotypic response of human beings to a configuration of internal sexual drives and external sexual stimuli, which serves to increase the probability of sexual pairing and bonding so as to enhance the survival of the species. Or to put it in another, rather crass way, falling in love is a trick that our genes pull on our otherwise perceptive mind to hoodwink or trap us into marriage. Frequently the trick goes awry one way or another, as when the sexual drives and stimuli are homosexual or when other forces-parental interference, mental illness, conflicting responsibilities or mature self-disciplinesupervene to prevent the bonding. On the other hand, without this trick, this illusory and inevitably temporary (it would not be practical were it not temporary) regression to infantile merging and omnipotence, many of us who are happily or unhappily married today would have retreated in whole- hearted terror from the realism of the marriage vows. ~ M. Scott Peck

Getting to have an opportunity to tell a story that is about mental illness and how it affects one's self and one's community was really something that really meant a lot to me. ~ Bryce Dallas Howard

Suddenly, I'm lighter, only half of who I was. ~ Shannon Mullen

But even then I knew it wasn't me that saved her life. It wasn't about me. I was just there while she was maybe going to die and maybe not, and then she just didn't. ~ Lucy Corin

Mental illness is real illness ~ Andrew Solomon

I am ready to fly with both wings. Every day will always be filled with hope because every day is a new beginning to fulfill my destiny. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

People with mental health problems are almost never dangerous. In fact, they are more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators. At the same time, mental illness has been the common denominator in one act of mass violence after another. ~ Roy Blunt

Recovery doesn't mean putting your life on hold. Recovery means holding on so you can live your best life. ~ Brittany Burgunder

It is not the darkness of shadows: one that follows you, haunts you, terrifies you.
Instead, it consumes you, becomes you, weighs you down.
It IS you.
It is comforting. Familiar.
I have walked with it. Eaten with it. Loved with it. Smiled with it.
Yet I feel it destroying me.
Like cancer.
But I can't remove it. It stays inside of me, taunting me to kill it, myself, but it does not realize that this seduction keeps me alive. ~ Shannon Mullen

Prideful fool. It hurt his feelings that he couldn't make my crazy go away. You know how men are. Always trying to fix things can't be fixed. ~ Ken Wheaton

There are such things as delusions, but not every unlikely vision that the mentally ill have is imaginary. ~ Shepherd Hoodwin

I can tell you that "Just cheer up" is almost universally looked at as the most unhelpful depression cure ever. It's pretty much the equivalent of telling someone who just had their legs amputated to "just walk it off." Some people don't understand that for a lot of us, mental illness is a severe chemical imbalance rather just having "a case of the Mondays." Those same well-meaning people will tell me that I'm keeping myself from recovering because I really "just need to cheer up and smile." That's when I consider chopping off their arms and then blaming them for not picking up their severed arms so they can take them to the hospital to get reattached. ~ Jenny Lawson

Love is a grave mental illness. ~ Plato

I think one thing is that anybody who's had to contend with mental illness - whether it's depression, bipolar illness or severe anxiety, whatever - actually has a fair amount of resilience in the sense that they've had to deal with suffering already, personal suffering. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

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

We all talk to ourselves. Those we call mad just talk a little louder. ~ Marty Rubin

While there is a real urgency for caution, there is also an overwhelming urgency for calm. My greatest concern is that the driving force of this pandemic may cause those who have no signs or symptomology to develop other chronic fears, anxieties and medical conditions. Heightened fears and anxieties will not make you feel safer. Compulsive and impulsive purchases will not protect you from the virus. It is important that you take care of your physical and mental health. Follow what your state and county are advising you to do. The sky is not falling and life will return to normal. The most prudent thing that people can do at this time, is to take commonsense approaches to reduce your risk of exposure. ~ Asa Don Brown

Remember above all that mental stability comes by examining the contents of the mind, not by avoidence. ~ Vernon Howard

People may be constrained in two basic ways: physically, by confining them in jails, mental hospitals, and so forth; and symbolically, by confining them in occupations, social roles, and so forth. Actually, confinement of the second type is more common and pervasive in the day-to-day conduct of society's business; as a rule, only when the symbolic, or socially informal, confinement of conduct fails or proves inadequate, is recourse taken to physical, or socially formal, confinement…. When people perform their social roles properly – in other words, when social expectations are adequately met – their behavior is considered normal. Though obvious, this deserves emphasis: a waiter must wait on tables; a secretary must type; a father must earn a living; a mother must cook and sew and take care of her children. Classic systems of psychiatric nosology had nothing to say about these people, so long as they remained neatly imprisoned in their respective social cells; or, as we say about the Negroes, so long as they "knew their place." But when such persons broke out of "jail" and asserted their liberty, they became of interest to the psychiatrist. ~ Thomas Szasz

I'm tired of having such a happy, perfect life. And that can only be a sign of mental illness. That's what I fall asleep thinking. Perhaps I really do have a serious problem. ~ Paulo Coelho

The best people in a dying culture are the outcasts considered crazy by the leaders; the ones most disillusioned with their own culture. In Yeats' phrase, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Intense emotional attachment to any value, any virtue, any set of "shoulds" is a disease, a mental illness, a condition of self-murder and cultural assassination. ~ Brad Blanton

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

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

We must adjust our emotive outlook before drowning in bitterness and choking on despair. We must periodically weed out pangs of disenchantment and scour disillusionment from our hearts in order to console and replenish the depleted resolve of our spirit. Finding ourselves crippled by physical injury, weakened by illness, or left stranded in a vulnerable emotional condition brought on by grief, disappointment, and other physiological or psychological crisis, we must each examine our values and update our mythological mental maps in order to generate a source of stirred concentrate steeling a rejuvenated march onward. Perhaps our sources of revitalizing energy will stem from gaining a new perspective on ancient challenges, by establishing new hopes and dreams, or by delving a lofty purpose behind our efforts. Alternatively, perhaps we only develop the resolve to resume our scrupulous assault on the important issues of life by orchestrating a fundamental transformation of the self, a complete restructuring of our values and goals. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster