Mental-illness Quotes

When mental [illness] increases until it reaches the danger point, do not exhaust yourself by effort...

I see now the virtue in madness, for this country knows no law nor any boundary. I pity the poor sha...

A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.

It was nothing but a hole, a mouth open wide. You could lean over the edge and peer down to see noth...

So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but...

Insanity? The mental processes of a man with whom one disagrees, are always wrong. Where is the line...

To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.

This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire e...

Anybody can look at you. It's quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.

The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tighteni...

Everyone wanted me to feed them that story—darkness to light, weakness to strength, broken to whole....

It’s so weird, to know you’re crazy and not be able to do anything about it, you know? It’s not like...

He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike pur...

We who were not so pathologically far out on the spectrum of self-involvement, we dwellers of the vi...

Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.

How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectr...

This is glorious!' I cried, and then i looked at the sinner by my side. He sat with his head sunk on...

the intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness if my mind's flight made it very difficult for me to ...

It took me far too long to realize that lost years and relationships cannot be recovered. That damag...

Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, f...

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness...

Her parents, she said, has put a pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The re...

When both she and I had to deal with our respective demons, my sister saw the darkness as being with...

But money spent while manic doesn't fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense...

God only knew what ran underneath the fierce self-discipline and emotional control that had come wit...

I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current s...

He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just t...

Toni hears voices," said Trapp. "But who is this Dr. Ellsworth to tell her she's a schizophrenic? Ma...

You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill...

Eventually my mother suffered a complete breakdown, and the court orders were finally signed. They t...

My grandfather often felt frustrated or baffled by my grandmother's illness, but when it came to the...

Stigmas speak to the idea of difference and how difference shames us and those we know.

Holding one's self responsible is a critical feature in stigma and in the generation of shame since ...

At the root of this dilemma is the way we view mental health in this country. Whether an illness aff...

Illness is always an interaction between [mind and body]. It can begin in the mind and affect the bo...

He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idi...

After being hurt by the world so much, they began to see the demons within humans. So without hiding...

For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretc...

Show me what you've written," I said, although I wanted desperately to avoid looking at it.

And I was incapable of living all by myself in those lodgings where I didn't know a soul. It terrifi...

Even now it comes as a shock if by chance I notice in the street a face resembling someone I know ho...

It is painful for the plant which is myself to live in the atmosphere and light of this world. Somew...

I wonder if there is anyone who is not depraved. A wearisome thought.I want money. Unless I have it....

Am I cured?” “No. You’re someone who is different, but who wants to be the same as everyone else. An...

Now his work-mates pitied him, although they tried not to show it, and it was generally arranged tha...

His body had become a companion which seemed always about to leave him: it had its own pains which m...

The exegesis Fat labored on month after month struck me as a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one -...

I've always told people that for each person there is a sentence--a series of words--which has the p...

It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis,' or, put another way, a psychosis ...

Preaching a man a sermon with a broken head and telling him to be right with God is equal to telling...

Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even ...

It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the ...

But the strange thing, the thing that you can never explain to anyone, except another nut, or, if yo...

Office Peone looked at John and wondered what mental illness he had. The Seattle streets were filled...

And then I realized that my sister was trying to LIVE a romance novel. Man, that takes courage and i...

If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique...

I’ve found that it’s of some help to think of one’s moods and feelings about the world as being simi...

The uncomfortable, as well as the miraculous, fact about the human mind is how it varies from indivi...

I used to think it utterly normal that I suffered from “suicidal ideation” on an almost daily basis....

Don’t ask me those questions! Don’t ask me what life means or how we know reality or why we have to ...

Suicide is a form of murder— premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think...

Kaysen elaborates through parts of the book on her thoughts about how mental illness is treated. She...

Are you crazy? It's a common phrase, I know. But it means something particular to me: the tunnels, t...

Viscosity occurs on a cellular level. And so does velocity.In contrast to viscosity's cellular coma,...

I’m not flailing now, as my muscles are rigid with the tension of holding myself together. The pain ...

Have I gone mad like Anne and no one has the heart to tell me? I wish someone would tell me, I feel ...

Haymitch isn't thinking of arenas, but something else. "Johanna's back in the hospital."I assumed Jo...

I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather...

What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sigh...

We all feel inadequate very often. It’s only when it gets chronic that it is disturbing to one’s emo...

The ethics of psychiatric therapy is the very negation of the ethics of political liberty. The forme...

The medical profession's classic prescription for coping with such predicaments, Primum non nocere (...

The term 'deinstitutionalization' conceals some simple truths, namely, that old, unwanted persons, f...

We cannot institutionalize helping the "victims" of personal disasters.

The pressure to reduce health care costs is aimed only at the treatment of real diseases. There is n...

The cruelty intrinsic to the workhouse system was excused by the need to discourage idleness, much a...

The young and the old are defenseless against relatives who want to get rid of them by casting them ...

The fatal weakness of most psychiatric historiographies lies in the historians' failure to give suff...

When and why do we attribute a person's behavior to brain disease, and when and why do we not do so?...

Although both home and mental illness are complex, modern ideas, we have fallen into the habit of us...

A vast amount of psychiatric effort has been, and continues to be, devoted to legal and quasi-legal ...

Psychiatrists look for twisted molecules and defective genes as the causes of schizophrenia, because...

Well,' said Can o' Beans, a bit hesitantly,' imprecise speech is one of the major causes of mental i...

You can live to be old or young, but you'll always have moments when you lose your head.

I know, Little Man, you are quick with the diagnosis of craziness when you meet a truth you don’t li...

A disruption of the circadian cycle—the metabolic and glandular rhythms that are central to our work...

depression in its major stages possesses no quickly available remedy: failure of alleviation is one ...

The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills ...

it has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers fr...

my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought ...

Our “increasing mental sickness” may find expression in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are conspi...

There are cancers so insidious in their nature that their very pulsation is invisible. Such cancers ...

Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illnes...

We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

To not have your suffering recognized is an almost unbearable form of violence.

A man who under the influence of mental pain or unbearably oppressive suffering sends a bullet throu...

In the absence of any therapy, the mentally ill of the 20th century were chained, shackled, straitja...

That is what madness is, isn't it? All the wheels fly off the bus and things don't make sense any mo...

You can talk about depression as a "chemical imbalance" all you want, but it presents itself as an e...

The confusion boys experience about their identity is heightened during adolescence. In many ways th...