Mental Illness Stigma Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

The stigma of mental illness is still alive and well. ~ Kate Clifford Larson

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

I had people saying 'it's all in your head'. Do you honestly think I want to feel this way? ~ Sonia Estrada

When you become bipolar you break things that you can't later fix. ~ Bradley Good

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

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

Self-stigma refers to the state in which a person with mental illness has come to internalize the negative attitudes about mental illness and turns them against him- or herself. ~ Patrick W. Corrigan

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

The stigma of mental illness is first and foremost a social justice issue! ~ Patrick 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

The word "depressed" is spoken phonetically as "deep rest". We can view depression not as a mental illness, but on a deeper level, as a profound, and very misunderstood, state of deep rest, entered into when we are completely exhausted by the weight of our own identity. ~ Jeff Foster

Against all expectations, the symptoms of Van Gogh's mental illness are conspicuous by their almost complete absence from his letters. Much as he chose not to paint before he had fully recovered from one of his attacks, so he refrained from writing at times of crisis. Throughout his life, admittedly, his letters bear witness to a man possessed, frequently agitated, enraged, dejected, obsessed, but never deranged, or emotionally or intellectually unstable. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

Gingerbread
I knew I had to get out of there
before the icing cracked and they discovered
that I'm burnt around the edges,
doughy in the center,
that what they thought was sugar
is salt.

If I was a good girl,
if I could satisfy their cravings,
if every dream in my misshapen head
didn't bite, I might have stayed at the table.

Wouldn't you run, too,
from such voracious love? ~ Christine Heppermann

As for wondering if it's okay to be who you are--that's not a symptom of mental illness. That's a symptom of being a person. ~ Jeff Garvin

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

Nobody seemed to have any perspective any longer. Those were low points. But we got through it. ~ Uma Thurman

It is in my head! That's why it's called Mental Illness. ~ Roni Askey-Doran

Wondering is a positive madness. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Stevie woke the next morning, which was a good start. When things are bad, give yourself a point for everything. ~ Maureen Johnson

But the strange thing, the thing that you can never explain to anyone, except another nut, or, if you're lucky, a doctor who has an unusual amount of sense-stranger than the hallucinations, or the voices, or the anxiety-is the way you begin to experience the edges of the mind itself ... in a way other people just can't. ~ Samuel R. Delany

Etta, it could be everything, it could be nothing, what you're making up. You shouldn't let that bother you. ~ Emma Hooper

I loved the idea of a subversive world where mental illness was defined as just another version of normal, and education was how you made your way in the world, not something that began or ended. ~ Heather Sellers

It is sometimes pleasant even to act like a madman. ~ Seneca The Younger

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

In the 1970s, a group of researchers got themselves deliberately confined to mental asylums across United States. They did this by pretending to hear voices. They pretended to hear a voice saying, Empty, Dull and Thud.
But as soon as they were admitted to the wards, they stopped pretending and never mention the voice again.
And here's the mad part
The hospital staff outright refused to believe they were better, and kept them locked up anyway - some of them for months on end -each forced into accepting they had a mental illness, and agreeing to take drugs as a condition of their release. This is what labels do. They stick. ~ Nathan Filer

But Hey, Guess What
Crazy means I'm not liable
for my actions. So screw it,
I'll go home, propped up on
Prozac against distractions ~ Ellen Hopkins

Sharon dropped to her knees and reached her hand over the edge. The gesture was supposed to be a sign of support. But she realized then that it was useless. His insanity was like the stream beneath the ground. It only flowed in one direction, into deeper and deeper darkness. She was going to lose him. ~ Christopher Pike

Cousin Mary hoped her journey through periods of dark and light was like that of a Swiss train toiling up the mountainside, in and out of tunnels but always a little farther up the hill at each emergence. But she could only hope that this was so, she did not feel it. It seemed to her that she did not advance at all and that what she was learning now was only to hold on. The Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass, she remembered, had had to run fast merely to stay where she was, but doubtless she had run in hope, disdaining despair; and hope, Cousin Mary discovered, when deliberately opposed to despair, was one of the tough virtues. ~ Elizabeth Goudge

I can overcome my illness of attachment."
~Love is respect ♥~ ~ Charlena E. Jackson

But if love is not the cure, it certainly can act as a very strong medicine. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

We have a serious problem with incarceration in this country. It's destroying families, it's destroying communities and we're the most incarcerated country in the world, and when you look deeper and look at the reasons we got to this place, we as a society made some choices politically and legislatively, culturally to deal with poverty, deal with mental illness in a certain way and that way usually involves using incarceration. ~ John Legend

The pressure to reduce health care costs is aimed only at the treatment of real diseases. There is no pressure to reduce the costs of treating fictitious diseases. On the contrary, there is pressure to define ever more types of undesirable behaviors as mental disorders or addictions and to spend ever more tax dollars on developing new psychiatric diagnoses and facilities for storing and treating the victims of such diseases, whose members now include alcoholics, drug abusers, smokers, overeaters, self-starvers, gamblers, etc. ~ Thomas Szasz

What's more insane? Hearing imaginary voices? Or not hearing the real ones? ~ Forrest Carr

Every one wants to be a Genius. But only the brave choose to go mad to get there ... ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

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

We can and should complain about certain horrors of the modern world, but when it comes to the treatment of mental illness, the advances made in the last hundred years have been far more significant than the space program, nuclear fission, or even The Wire, for so many fortunate people. ~ Rob Delaney

Trapped within the confines of his mind, he is too aware of every thought passing through it, as if he were outside, looking in. At night he often lies awake ruminating endlessly about what's wrong with him, about death, and about the meaning of existence itself. At times his arms and legs feel like they don't belong with his body. But most of the time, his mind feels like it is operating apart from the body that contains it. ~ Daphne Simeon

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

By any objective measure, the modern business of "psychopharmacology" - the use of drugs to treat everything from anxiety and insomnia to schizophrenia itself - has to be judged a failure. Few patients, if any, are cured. The most violent manifestations of mental illness can be controlled, but with what long-term consequences, no one knows. ~ James Gleick

People can't listen until they're ready. I sure couldn't. I was, like, deaf to everyone except the thoughts. They were the boss of me. ~ Teresa Toten

We are all unique in our minds in varied ways. I find pleasure In nature as you find it in alcohol. How then shall I call the other an addict while I myself I am a nature junkie? ~ Yefon Isabelle

Adam returned his gaze to the cross. The Jesus was hurting. Guilt simmered and then boiled in him. Jesus had a whole world of suffering and horror to worry about and here Adam was in all his punk puniness. He didn't want to add to Jesus's burdens, but...

'Sorry about that. Look, I know you're busy and I don't want to get greedy with your time, but still, if you could just help me... If you could find a minute, please, please, please, dear sweet Jesus, fix me. ~ Teresa Toten

Illness is always an interaction between [mind and body]. It can begin in the mind and affect the body, or it can begin in the body and affect the mind, both of which are served by the same bloodstream. Attempts to treat most mental diseases as though they were completely free of physical causes and attempts to treat most bodily diseases as though the mind were in no way involved must be considered archaic in the light of new evidence about the way the human body functions. ~ Norman Cousins

I cut off all my hair, cut away
at the soft curves of my clothing
until I have edges once again,
using my body like broken glass
to slice at the world around me.

I have to take something back,
because I have nothing more to give.

Eloi, eloi, lema sabachthani? ~ Miriam Joy

For once, I'd love if someone reacted unpredictably to death. Chant or somersault or fucking yodel to show me you have a mind of your own. ~ Halo Scot

I am grateful to look in the mirror to see a new and improved me. ~ Charlena E. Jackson

When I started displaying a dementia like illness, I began developing quotes to exercise my damaged brain. ~ Steven Magee

With psychiatric medications, you solve one problem for a period of time, but the next thing you know you end up with two problems. The treatment turns a period of crisis into a chronic mental illness. - Amy Upham (203) ~ Robert Whitaker

People with mental illnesses aren't wrapped up in themselves because they are intrinsically any more selfish than other people. Of course not. They are just feeling things that can't be ignored. Things that point the arrows inward. ~ Matt Haig

Brenda, do you know God loves you? He really does. To Him, you're perfect, absolutely perfect. You always have been. ~ Nikki Rosen

Okay, so when is the mother ship coming to pick us up?" I ask worriedly. "The what?" Reed asks with confusion clouding his eyes. "The mother ship, you know, aliens?" I ask tensely. He gives me an impatient look. "Aliens?" he scoffs. "We're not aliens then?" I reply, not even trying to keep the relief out of my voice. "No!" he says emphatically as he searches my face - probably for other signs of mental illness. Sighing, I ask, "Then what are we, Reed? Because seriously, if some big alien bug cracks me open from the inside and starts wiggling out, I'm going to be really ticked off that you didn't warn me. ~ Amy A. Bartol

Our family suffers from a hereditary condition called, generally, mental illness. Specifically, multiple family members in successive generations have suffered from either bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. ~ Victor LaValle

There is no logic inside a crazy mind. ~ Steven Magee

A young man is afraid of his demon and puts his hand over the demon's mouth sometimes and speaks for him. And the things the young man says are very rarely poetry. ~ D.H. Lawrence

If you think about it, the public perception of funky brain chemistry has been as varied and weird as the symptoms, historically speaking.

If I had been born a Native American in another time, I might have been lauded as a medicine man. My voices would have been seen as the voices of ancestors imparting wisdom. I would have been treated with great mystical regard.

If I had lived in biblical times, I might have been seen as a prophet, because, let's face it, there are really only two possibilities: either prophets were actually hearing God speaking to them, or they were mentally ill. I'm sure if an actual prophet surfaced today, he or she would receive plenty of Haldol injections, until the sky opened up and the doctors were slapped silly by the Hand of God.

In the Dark Ages my parents would have sent for an exorcist, because I was clearly possessed by evil spirits, or maybe even the Devil himself.

And if I lived in Dickensian England, I would have been thrown into Bedlam, which is more than just a description of madness. It was an actual place - a "madhouse" where the insane were imprisoned in unthinkable conditions.

Living in the twenty-first century gives a person a much better prognosis for treatment, but sometimes I wish I'd lived in an age before technology. I would much rather everyone think I was a prophet than some poor sick kid. ~ Neal Shusterman

The fear of the drugs running out is managable-the fear of time running down isn't. ~ Ann Marlowe