Mental Illness Health Quotes

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

Wondering is a positive madness. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Since the Second World War, rates of common mental illness (depression and anxiety) have been increasing in the industrialized nations, whereas rates of recovery from severe mental illness have not improved despite the availability of apparently effective therapies such as antipsychotic drugs. ~ Richard Bentall

I've been looking deep within myself. I realize that I am always crashing because I was trying to fly with one wing. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

Treatment for people with disabilities and mental illness in prewar America reveals a profoundly ignorant medical establishment and educational community. ~ Kate Clifford Larson

Yr had a region called the Fear-bog. Lactamaeon had taken her there once to see the monsters and corpses of her nightmares accumulating there from year after year of terrifying dreams. They had swum through the almost solid ground.
She had said, What is that awful stench?
Shame and secrecy, Bird-one, shame and secrecy, he had answered. ~ Joanne Greenberg

Professor A. H. Maslow, for example, has conducted a series of researches into extremely healthy people that have led him to conclude that health and optimism are far more positive principles in human psychology than Freud would ever have admitted.

Man is a slave to the delusion that he is a passive creature, a creature of circumstance; this is because he makes the mistake of identifying himself with his limited everyday consciousness, and is unaware of the immense forces that lie just beyond the threshold of consciousness. But these forces, although he is unaware of them on a conscious level, are still a far more active influence in his life than any external circumstances. Freudian psychology, for all its achievements, has made a twofold error: it has tried to anatomize the human mind as a pathologist would dissect a corpse, and it has limited its researches to sick human beings. Sick men talk about their illness far more than healthy people talk about their health; in fact, healthy people are usually too absorbed in living to bother with self-revelation. Psychology has consequently been inclined to divide the world into sick people and "normal" people, regarding occasional super-normality as the exception; Maslow has shown that super-normality is a great deal commoner than would be supposed; in fact as common as sub-normality. Ordinarily healthy people often experience a sense of intense life-affirmation (which Maslow calls "peak experiences"); and examination o ~ Colin Wilson

It's my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other easily understood disease just to make it easier on me and also on them. ~ Jennifer Niven

I made the decision to renew my strength and count the good, the bad, the pain, and the hurt. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

You stole my soul. You robbed me of my happiness. You tore down my self-esteem. I am here because of you! Not anymore! ~ Charlena E. Jackson

The thing about a song is that, if you break it down, it's all chaos," I say. "Like, there's all these different notes, different instruments, different sounds. It's a mess. But you add a beat and a rhythm and somehow everything can come together and make something beautiful. I think that's what I'm trying to do. Find a rhythm for the mess in my head, so that it somehow... makes sense. ~ Hanna Alkaf

I wonder if there is anyone who is not depraved. A wearisome thought.
I want money. Unless I have it ...
In my sleep, a natural death! ~ Osamu Dazai

Sensitive people usually love deeply and hate deeply. They don't know any other way to live than by extremes because thier emotional theromastat is broken. ~ Shannon L. Alder

He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost. ~ Osamu Dazai

I needed to put two critical ideas together: that I could both be mentally ill and lead a rich and satisfying life. ~ Elyn R. Saks

In retrospect, crappy chemicals in my brain were working overtime, driving me to destroy myself, like that thing that makes lemmings throw them¬selves over a cliff. ~ Felicia Day

Where there is ignorance, sickness will thrive. ~ Osamu Tezuka

I think we need to talk about mental illness a lot more. People complain about tax dollars and say we don't have the money. But if we can't put some of our investments, or some of our money back into humans, isn't that where it all begins? ~ Nia Long

If you can sit with your pain, listen to your pain and respect your pain - in time you will move through your pain. ~ Bryant McGill

When I talk to the National Alliance on
Mental Illness (NAMI) and other patient
support groups, I take questions at the
end. At one talk I was asked, "What's
the difference between yourself and
someone without mental illness?"
At another talk I was asked, "How do
you make the voices be not so mean?"
I wish I knew. ~ Mark Vonnegut

It would seem that the affects, biological needs, and forms of behavior most repressed in a given culture are the ones most likely to give rise to symptoms . [ ... ]
in our culture it is considered much more acceptable to have an organic illness than an emotional or mental disorder; this would influence the fact that anxiety and other emotional stresses in our culture so often take a somatic form. In short, the culture conditions the way a person tries to resolve his anxiety, and specifically what symptoms he may employ. ~ Rollo May

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

Our mother was different, but that's what we liked about her. While other children had strict routines and consequences, we had freedom and frivolity - and we didn't want the party to end. ~ Amra Pajalic

The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted. ~ Aldous Huxley

Gaiety has been the prisoner within a fleshy citadel of deathless pain. ~ The Raveness

Health is just not valued until illness comes. ~ Thomas Fuller

When I was a little girl everyone made fun of me and calling me awful names.Also saying i'm ugly and now i'm starting to believe it,because I can't seem to find a man that wants me so I go around the internet with a friends spreading false dating rumors on them being with me. ~ Genevieve Cortese

This is as close as I've ever heard to a Thomas and Carmel argument. And as special as it is to listen to your friends argue over whether or not you have a mental illness, I'm starting to get the urge to go back to class. ~ Kendare Blake

My illness is due to my doctor's insistence that I drink milk, a whitish fluid they force down helpless babies. ~ W.C. Fields

I was struck by the image of Daddy still dressed in that same plaid shirt and undershirt with the bloodstains below the neck, the one I had first seen him wearing in the jail the previous day. ~ Earl B. Russell

The scariest thing of all is never knowing what you're suddenly going to believe. ~ Neal Shusterman

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

The most dangerous thing of all, and something he wanted to warn me about above all else, the one thing that had consigned whole regiments of unfortunate young people to the twilight world of insanity, was reading books. This objectionable practice had increased among the younger generation, and Dad was more pleased than the could say to not that I had not yet displayed any such tendencies. Lunatic asylums were overflowing with folk who'd been reading too much. Once upon a time they'd been just like you and me, physically strong, straightforward, cheerful, and well balanced. Then they'd started reading. Most often by chance. A bout of flu perhaps, with a few days in bed. An attractive book cover that had aroused some curiosity. And suddenly the bad habit had taken hold. The first book had led to another. Then another, and another, all links in a chain that led straight down into the eternal night of mental illness. It was impossible to stop. It was worse than drugs.

It might just be possible, if you were very careful, to look at the occasional book that could teach you something, such as encyclopedias or repair manuals. The most dangerous kind of book was fiction-- that's where all the brooding was sparked and encouraged. Damnit all! Addictive and risky products like that should only be available in state-regulated monopoly stores, rationed and sold only to those with a license, and mature in age. ~ Mikael Niemi

Before the earthquake, medicine was hard to find. When you went to the hospital, you had to bring your own. In this country, you don't go there until the pain becomes unbearable. Otherwise, you don't consider yourself sick. It's better not to be sick if you can't pay for the medicine. That way, you go from bring in good health to being dead. Illness is a luxury you can't afford if you don't have the means. So you die without ever having been sick. ~ Dany Laferriere

And when I realized you had secrets too, I was glad. I thought we could be honest with each other. That we could finally rid ourselves of all the clutter from our past. Not our possessions, but the stuff we carry around inside our heads. Because that's what I've realized, living in One Folgate Street. You can make your surroundings as polished and empty as you like. But it doesn't really matter if you're still messed up inside. And that's all anyone's looking for really, isn't it? Someone to take care of the mess inside our heads? ~ J.P. Delaney

It's like each face was a sign like one of those "I'm Blind" signs the dago accordion players in Portland hung around their necks, only these signs say "I'm tired" or "I'm scared" or "I'm dying of a bum liver" or "I'm all bound up with machinery and people pushing me alla time." I can read all the signs, it don't make any difference how little the print gets. ~ Ken Kesey

Police ought to protect communities as well as individuals ... Just as physicians now recognize the importance of fostering health rather than simply treating illness, so the police - and the rest of us - ought to recognize the importance of maintaining, intact, communities without broken windows. ~ James Q. Wilson

Keep up your determination and drive, because you have the willpower to fight off your weakness. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

Health, not illness, is our natural state. It's usually just a matter of finding it tucked beneath the layers of imbalance that have accumulated over time. ~ Suhas G. Kshirsagar

She would like to say, Listen, Dr. Sue, deep down there is a thing inside me, and sometimes it swells up like the head of a squid and shoots blackness through me. I haven't wanted to be this way, but so help me, I have loved my son. ~ Elizabeth Strout

After I returned to New Jersey, I thought I was safe, because I did not think Kenny G could leave the bad place, which I realize is silly now - because Kenny G is extremely talented and resourceful and a powerful force to be reckoned with. ~ Matthew Quick

I have a mind like a sieve,
where sadness sits
and happiness slips ~ Kara Petrovic

A genetic fundamentalism permeates public awareness these days. It may be summed up as the belief that almost every illness and every human trait is dictated by heredity. Simplified media accounts, culled from semidigested research findings, have declared that inflexible laws of DNA rule the biological world. It was reported in 1996 that according to some psychologists, genes determine about 50 percent of a person's inclination to experience happiness. Social ability and obesity are two more among the many human qualities now claimed to be genetic.

True or not, narrow genetic explanations for ADD and every other condition of the mind do have their attractions. They are easy to grasp, socially conservative and psychologically soothing. They raise no uncomfortable questions about how a society and culture might erode the health of its members, or about how life in a family may have affected a person's physiology or emotional makeup. As I have personally experienced, feelings of guilt are almost inevitable for the parents of a troubled child. They are all too frequently reinforced by the uninformed judgments of friends, neighbors, teachers or even total strangers on the bus or in the supermarket. Parental guilt, even if misplaced, is a wound for which the genetic hypothesis offers a balm ~ Gabor Mate

Do you ever feel as if everything surrounding you is in slow motion, moving through tar? There you are - and there's the world. You're outside staring in the window, observing reality happen, but you don't exist in it. You just watch, and watch. That's how I feel, like the dead butterfly staring back at you through the glass. ~ Kyle Labe

Locking away appetite, anger, the fullness of life, anorexia helps cover up whatever struggles inside. With its controlling bouts of bingeing and starvation, of trance and half-life, it becomes a shield to fend off despair and longing and what most of use would see as ordinary responsible behavior. ~ Carol Lee

I kept pushing against the black, though, almost a reflex. I wasn't trying to lift it. I was just resisting. Not allowing it to crush me completely. I wasn't Atlas, and the black felt as heavy as a planet; I couldn't shoulder it. All I could do was not be entirely obliterated. ~ Stephenie Meyer

You see demons in the eyes of the world, and the world sees a bottomless pit in yours. ~ Neal Shusterman

I love the skin I am in! I love my body and I feel better than I ever felt before! ~ Charlena E. Jackson

It was the face of a human being who'd been constructed exclusively of wounds. Not time or history or ambition, nothing but wounds. The face of a person who could probably kill someone without feeling anything whatsoever. ~ Ryu Murakami