c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Mental illnesses grab you by the leg, screaming, and chow you down whole.They make you selfish. They make you irrational. They make you irrational. They make you self-absorbed. They make you needy. They make you cancel plans last minute. They make you not very fun to spend time with. They make you exhausting to be near.
— Holly Bourne, Am I Normal Yet?
Our society is stuck between problem and solution when it comes to treating mental illness. We cannot find a solution until we agree on the problem. And it is my humble opinion that the problem is fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of the misunderstood. Instead, let us seek to pursue knowledge over fear. Let's find a way to save lives that can be saved.
— Hannah Hart, Buffering: Unshared Tales of a Life Fully Loaded
I feel like I'm stuck inside my body. Everyone's moved forward, but I've been stuck in the same place. Since I've come into all this awareness lately, the hardest part has been remembering who I used to be, the dreams that died, the years I've lost.
— Sidney Halston, Pull Me Close
It was like I'd climbed Everest, had the summit in my sight, the flag in my hand, all ready to pierce it into the top of the mountain and say, "Whoopdedoo, I made it," and then an avalanche from out of nowhere swept me right back to the bottom of the mountain again. Was it worth bothering to try and climb it again? I was exhausted. I'd already climbed it. I didn't want to...but, then, what other choice was there?
— Holly Bourne, Am I Normal Yet?
Mental illness is a physical illness, not some disease that enters the minds of the weak or characterless. Like cancer can happen to anyone, let's start treating mental illnesses as what they are, devastating diseases. ~ Sherry Hunter
— Sherry Hunter
There is always a man eager to explain my mental illness to me. They all do it so confidently, motioning to their Hemingway and Bukowski bookshelf as they compare my depression to their late-night loneliness. There is always someone that rejected them that they equate their sadness to and a bottle of gin (or a song playing, or a movie) close by that they refer to as their cure. Somehow, every soft confession of my Crazy that I hand to them turns into them pulling out pieces of themselves to prove how it really is in my head.So many dudes I’ve dated have faces like doctors ready to institutionalize and love my crazy (but only on Friday nights.)They tell their friends about my impulsive decision making and how I “get them” more than anyone they’ve ever met but leave out my staring off in silence for hours and the self-inflicted bruises on my cheeks.None of them want to acknowledge a crazy they can’t cure.They want a crazy that fits well into a trope and gives them a chance to play Hero. And they always love a Crazy that provides them material to write about.Truth is they love me best as a cigarette cloud of impossibility, with my lipstick applied perfectly and my Crazy only being pulled out when their life needs a little spice.They don’t want me dirty, having not left my bed for days. Not diseased. Not real.So they invite me over when they’re going through writer’s block but don’t answer my calls during breakdowns. They tell me I look beautiful when I’m crying then stick their hands in-between my thighs. They mistake my silence for listening to them attentively and say my quiet mouth understands them like no one else has.These men love my good dead hollowness. Because it means less of a fighting personality for them to force out. And is so much easier to fill someone who has already given up with themselves.
— Lora Mathis
The Mania SpeaksYou clumsy bootlegger. Little daffodil.I watered you with an ocean and you plucked one little vein?Downed a couple bottles of pills and got yourself carted off to the ER? I gifted you the will of gunpowder, a matchstick tongue, and all you managed was a shredded sweater and a police warning? You should be legend by now.Girl in an orange jumpsuit, a headline.I built you from the purest napalm, fed you wine and bourbon.Preened you in the dark, hammered lullabies into your thin skull.I painted over the walls, wrote the poems. I shook your goddamn boots. Now you want out? Think you’ll wrestle me out of you with prescriptions?A good man’s good love and some breathing exercises? You think I can’t tame that? I always come home. Always. Ravenous. Loaded. You know better than anybody: I’m bigger than God.
— Jeanann Verlee, Said the Manic to the Muse
Feelings don't try to kill you,even the painful ones. Anxiety is a feeling grown too large. A feeling grown aggressive and dangerous. You're responsible for its consequences, you're responsible for treating it
— Patrick Ness, The Rest of Us Just Live Here
Unfortunately, mental health is so misunderstood that some people think you have to be crazy to need to speak to a therapist.
— Nicole Curtis, Better Than New: How Saving Old Homes Saved Me
Today, over 50 percent of prison and jail inmates in the United States have a diagnosed mental illness, a rate nearly five times greater than that of the general adult population. Nearly one in five prison and jail inmates has a serious mental illness. In fact, there are more than three times the number of seriously mentally ill individuals in jail or prison than in hospitals; in some states that number is ten times. And prison is a terrible place for someone with mental illness or a neurological disorder that prison guards are not trained to understand.
— Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
He tried to sleep, but his head was filled with the faces of lunatics, their palsied hands, their shattered eyes.
— Sebastian Faulks, Human Traces
A phenomenon that might seem only backwards or silly when expressed at a social level becomes madness at the individual level.
— Caitlín R. Kiernan
I began to imagine orchestration where before I heard only the cacophony of randomness. Crazy people do that all the time, unless you buy into the notion that we have the ability to perceive order and connotation in ways closed off to the minds of "sane" people. I don't. Subscribe to that notion, I mean. We are not gifted. We are not magical. We are slightly or profoundly broken.
— Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl
Beautiful things have been broken before…
— S.R. Crawford, From My Suffering: 25 Ways to Break the Chains of Anxiety, Depression & Stress
As smart as I am, it took a boy stuck in his house to teach me that sometimes it doesn't matter where you are at all. It only matters whos with you.
— John Corey Whaley, Highly Illogical Behavior
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, Challenger Deep
This is a very bad book you’re writing,” I said to myself behind my leaks. “I know,” I said. “You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your mother did,” I said. “I know,” I said. There in the cocktail lounge, peering out through my leaks at a world of my own invention, I mouthed this word: schizophrenia. The sound and appearance of the word had fascinated me for many years. It sounded and looked to me like a human being sneezing in a blizzard of soapflakes.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Breakfast of Champions
She was getting worse, but I knew that I had to stand by her. I knew the type of woman she really was and I needed to find a way to help her find herself. She didn’t give up on me when I hit bottom, so I wouldn’t give up on her.
— Matt Abrams, She's Toxic
Insanity? The mental processes of a man with whom one disagrees, are always wrong. Where is the line between wrong mind and sane mind? It is inconceivable that any sane man can radically disagree with one's most sane conclusions.
— Jack London, The Iron Heel
Centering, however, is easier said than done. This I learned from a ceramics class I once took. The teacher made throwing a pot look easy, but the thing is, it takes lots of precision and skill. You slam the ball of clay down in the absolute center of the pottery wheel, and with steady hands you push your thumb into the middle of it, spreading it wider a fraction of an inch at a time. But every single time I tried to do it, I only got so far before my pot warped out of balance, and every attempt to fix it just made it worse, until the lip shredded, the sides collapsed, and I was left with what the teacher called “a mystery ashtray,” which got hurled back into the clay bucket. So what happens when your universe begins to get off balance, and you don’t have any experience with bringing it back to center? All you can do is fight a losing battle, waiting for those walls to collapse, and your life to become one huge mystery ashtray.
— Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep
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, Faces in the Water
In the moments when I forgot to remind myself to remain calm, I rewarded myself with a multiversed chorus of self-denigration and blame. Weak. Inadequate. Damaged. A problem and a disappointment. The litany of criticism stuck in my brain, skipping through the same tired phrases, like an old, scratched, forty-five speed record, drumming my failure into the silence of the night, adding to my desperation and frustration. I had been singled out for the universe for a reason, and this illness was my fault. I knew that, even though saying as much out loud sounded like crazy talk. I couldn't explain why, but I felt like I deserved what I was getting.
— Ginny Gilder, Course Correction: A Story of Rowing and Resilience in the Wake of Title IX
Our brains are embodied—much of the problem with the debate over addiction and psychiatry more generally is a refusal to accept this and our ongoing need to see “physical,” “neurological,” and “psychological” as completely distinct.
— Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction
But what if I did tell people exactly what was going on? What if I valued my own peace of mind more than what other people think of me? Would I end up jobless, friendless, and loveless? Would I vanish entirely?
— Melissa Broder, So Sad Today: Personal Essays
We are all a collection of lost causes, stashed here so no one has to see just how wounded we are.
— Meg Haston, Paperweight
The primary driver to pathological dissociation is attachment disorganization in early life: when that is followed by severe and repeated trauma, then a major disorder of structural dissociation is created (Lyons-Ruth, Dutra, Schuder, & Bianchi, 2006).
— Frank M. Corrigan, Neurobiology and Treatment of Traumatic Dissociation: Towards an Embodied Self
Here's the hell of it: madness doesn't announce itself. There isn't time to prepare for its coming. It shows up without calling and sits in your kitchen ashing in your plant. You ask how long it plans to stay; it shrugs its shoulders, gets up, and starts digging through the fridge.
— Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life
I was always a good girl. I was a straight-A student, top of my class. I did as I was told. I was polite to my elders. I was good to my siblings. I went to church. It was very easy to hide how very bad I was becoming from my family, from everyone. Being good is the best way to be bad.
— Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist
Treatment for people with disabilities and mental illness in prewar America reveals a profoundly ignorant medical establishment and educational community.
— Kate Clifford Larson, Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter
Fools write books about madness being an elevated mental state or an alternative form of creativity. It's not, it's anguish.
— Jonathan Kellerman, Breakdown
It is a terrible thing to grieve for someone who is not dead, not in love with someone else, but just no longer there.
— Priya Parmar, Vanessa and Her Sister
Perfectionism is the unparalleled defense for emotionally abandoned children. The existential unattainability of perfection saves the child from giving up, unless or until, scant success forces him to retreat into the depression of a dissociative disorder, or launches him hyperactively into an incipient conduct disorder. Perfectionism also provides a sense of meaning and direction for the powerless and unsupported child. In the guise of self-control, striving to be perfect offers a simulacrum of a sense of control. Self-control is also safer to pursue because abandoning parents typically reserve their severest punishment for children who are vocal about their negligence.
— Pete Walker
Yes I'm Bipolar but I'm as normal as you except the times when my mind thinks like two
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
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, The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B
It was during those years that I discovered that loving [my father] was like sticking a blade into my own heart. It got me nowhere, except awake in the middle of the night, recalling the years when my father was the strongest, the smartest, the funniest, and I lay curled in my bed, wondering why I had been cheated out of a father who loved me, and one I could love in return.
— Alison Singh Gee, Where the Peacocks Sing: A Palace, a Prince, and the Search for Home
He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy
— Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Dissociative Disorders have a high rate of responsiveness to therapy and that with proper treatment, their prognosis is quite good.
— Marlene Steinberg, Interviewer's Guide to the Structured Clinical Interview for Dsm-IV (R) Dissociative Disorders (Scid-D)
My client who has only three alter personalities besides the ANP was unaware of her multiplicity until she encountered a work-related trauma at age sixty. She became symptomatic as the hidden parts emerged to deal with the recent trauma.
— Alison Miller, Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control
I honestly didn’t realize at the time that I was dealing with myself. But I suppose it’s true that I developed a therapy that provides the things I needed for so many years and never got.
— Marsha Linehan
There’s a tremendous need to implode the myths of mental illness, to put a face on it, to show people that a diagnosis does not have to lead to a painful and oblique life....We who struggle with these disorders can lead full, happy, productive lives, if we have the right resources.
— Elyn R. Saks
It is not unusual for subjects diagnosed with a Dissociative Disorder on the SCID-D to be surprised at having their symptoms validated by a clinician who understands the nature of their disorder.
— Marlene Steinberg, Interviewer's Guide to the Structured Clinical Interview for Dsm-IV (R) Dissociative Disorders (Scid-D)
In talking with people that have experienced it, I learned that PTSD is something that a person in a position of authority sometimes thinks they’re not supposed to have. They don’t always have an avenue to personally address it or even discuss it.
— Stana Katic
Does the person report having had the experience of meeting people she does not know but who seem to know her, perhaps by a different name? Often, those with DID are thought by others to be lying because different parts will say different things which the host has no knowledge of.
— Elizabeth F. Howell, Understanding and Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder: A Relational Approach
...when different identity states convey contradictory information and then have amnesia for what the other identity states said, the patient may be thought to be lying. This can appear to be characterological mendacity when it is not.
— Elizabeth F. Howell, Understanding and Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder: A Relational Approach
Many people with Dissociative Disorders are very creative and used their creative capacities to help them cope with childhood trauma.p55
— Marlene Steinberg, Interviewer's Guide to the Structured Clinical Interview for Dsm-IV (R) Dissociative Disorders (Scid-D)
Although Dissociative Disorders have been observed from the beginnings of psychiatry, the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R Dissociative Disorders (Steinberg 1985) was the first diagnostic instrument for the comprehensive evaluation of dissociative symptoms and to diagnose the presence of Dissociative Disorders.
— Marlene Steinberg, Structured Clinical Interview for Dsm-Iv(r) Dissociative Disorders
I'm Bipolar but as normal as you except for the times my mind thinks like two
— Stanley Victor Paskavich, Stantasyland: Quips Quotes and Quandaries
The SCID-D may be used to assess the nature and severity of dissociative symptoms in a variety of Axis I and II psychiatric disorders, including the Anxiety Disorders (such as Posttraumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD] and Acute Stress Disorder), Affective Disorders, Psychotic Disorders, Eating Disorders, and Personality Disorders.The SCID-D was developed to reduce variability in clinical diagnostic procedures and was designed for use with psychiatric patients as well as with nonpatients (community subjects or research subjects in primary care).
— Marlene Steinberg, Interviewer's Guide to the Structured Clinical Interview for Dsm-IV (R) Dissociative Disorders (Scid-D)
Dissociative identity disorder is conceptualized as a childhood onset, posttraumatic developmental disorder in which the child is unable to consolidate a unified sense of self. Detachment from emotional and physical pain during trauma can result in alterations in memory encoding and storage. In turn, this leads to fragmentation and compartmentalization of memory and impairments in retrieving memory.2,4,19 Exposure to early, usually repeated trauma results in the creation of discrete behavioral states that can persist and, over later development, become elaborated, ultimately developing into the alternate identities of dissociative identity disorder.
— Bethany L. Brand
What aided the mind made the body suffer. They could choose mental health or physical health, but they could not have both.
— Rufi Thorpe, Dear Fang, With Love
...the vast majority of these [dissociative identity disorder] patients have subtle presentations characterized by a mixture of dissociative and PTSD symptoms embedded with other symptoms, such as posttraumatic depression, substance abuse, somatoform symptoms, eating disorders, and self-destructive and impulsive behaviors.2,10A history of multiple treatment providers, hospitalizations, and good medication trials, many of which result in only partial or no benefit, is often an indicator of dissociative identity disorder or another form of complex PTSD.
— Bethany L. Brand
Prior to the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), the diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder had been referred to as Multiple Personality Disorder. The renaming of this diagnosis has caused quite a bit of confusion among professionals and those who live with DID. Because dissociation describes the process by which DID begins to develop, rather than the actual outcome of this process (the formation of various personalities), this new term may be a bit un
— Karen Marshall, Amongst Ourselves: A Self-Help Guide to Living with Dissociative Identity Disorder
When preparing for Book One, I talked to a couple of psychiatrists about psychosomatic phenomena, neuroses and dissociative conditions, for example the so—called hysterical blindness suffered by many who saw the Killing Fields in Pol Pot’s Cambodia: their eyes objectively see, but they are not aware of it and are blind because they believe they can’t see. One specialist told me that among modern Western people, ’metaphorical’ symptoms such as Fredy or those Cambodians evince are much rarer now than earlier in the twentieth century or before. Nowadays most people are better equipped by education to verbalise their neuroses, and have lots of jargon in which to do so. For most of the dissociative dimension, I could draw on things I knew from within myself.
— Les Murray, Fredy Neptune
The uncomfortable, as well as the miraculous, fact about the human mind is how it varies from individual to individual. The process of treatment can therefore be long and complicated. Finding the right balance of drugs, whether lithium salts, anti-psychotics, SSRIs or other kinds of treatment can be a very hit or miss heuristic process requiring great patience and classy, caring doctoring. Some patients would rather reject the chemical path and look for ways of using diet, exercise and talk-therapy. For some the condition is so bad that ECT is indicated. One of my best friends regularly goes to a clinic for doses of electroconvulsive therapy, a treatment looked on by many as a kind of horrific torture that isn’t even understood by those who administer it. This friend of mine is just about one of the most intelligent people I have ever met and she says, “I know. It ought to be wrong. But it works. It makes me feel better. I sometimes forget my own name, but it makes me happier. It’s the only thing that works.” For her. Lord knows, I’m not a doctor, and I don’t understand the brain or the mind anything like enough to presume to judge or know better than any other semi-informed individual, but if it works for her…. well then, it works for her. Which is not to say that it will work for you, for me or for others.
— Stephen Fry
you'll never see my books on Vanity Fair I'm not the type of author they would want there
— Stanley Victor Paskavich, Stantasyland: Quips Quotes and Quandaries
Shortly after I began work with Teresa, I acquired another MPD client, a supposedly schizophrenic young man I will call Tony. He called in to the clinic on a day I was on telephone duty, saying he was having flashbacks of "ritual abuse.” I did not yet know what that was. Tony became my client. He could be quite entertaining. I have a vivid memory of him as a three-year-old, "Tiny Tony,” standing on his head on my office couch, and running down the hall to try unsuccessfully to make it to the bathroom. He had in his head the entire rock band of Guns’n’Roses, and I got to know Axl, the band leader, quite well. I remember the time Tony was in hospital and I went to visit him; Axl popped out and said, "Remember, we’re schizophrenic in here!
— Alison Miller, Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse
Among DID individuals, the sharing of conscious awareness between alters exists in varying degrees. I have seen cases where there has appeared to be no amnestic barriers between individual alters, where the host and alters appeared to be fully cognizant of each other. On the other hand, I have seen cases where the host was absolutely unaware of any alters despite clear evidence of their presence. In those cases, while the host was not aware of the alters, there were alters with an awareness of the host as well as having some limited awareness of at least a few other alters. So, according to my experience, there is a spectrum of shared consciousness in DID patients. From a therapeutic point of view, while treatment of patients without amnestic barriers differs in some ways from treatment of those with such barriers, the fundamental goal of therapy is the same: to support the healing of the early childhood trauma that gave rise to the dissociation and its attendant alters.Good DID therapy involves promoting co­-consciousness. With co-­consciousness, it is possible to begin teaching the patient’s system the value of cooperation among the alters. Enjoin them to emulate the spirit of a champion football team, with each member utilizing their full potential and working together to achieve a common goal.Returning to the patients that seemed to lack amnestic barriers, it is important to understand that such co-consciousness did not mean that the host and alters were well-­coordinated or living in harmony. If they were all in harmony, there would be no “dis­ease.” There would be little likelihood of a need or even desire for psychiatric intervention. It is when there is conflict between the host and/or among alters that treatment is needed.
— David Yeung
DelusionsDissociative disorders, even those created by mind controllers, are not psychosis, but this program will create the most common symptom used to diagnose schizophrenia. The child is hurt while on a turntable, with people and television sets and cartoons and photographs all around the turntable. New alters created by the torture are instructed that they must obey their instructions and become the people around them, people on television, or other alters when they are told to. When this program is triggered, the survivor will hear “voices” of the people whom the "copy alters” are imitating, or will have many confused alters popping out who think they are actually other people or movie stars. The identities of the copy alters change when the survivor's surrounding change.
— Alison Miller, Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control
Dissociation, a form of hypnotic trance, helps children survive the abuse…The abuse takes on a dream-like, surreal quality and deadened feelings and altered perceptions add to the strangeness. The whole scene does not fit into the 'real world.' It is simple to forget, easy to believe nothing happened.
— Renee Fredrickson, Repressed Memories: A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse
You say I resemble a flower
—  I partly agree
YOU NEVER NEED TO APOLOGIZEFOR HOW YOU CHOSE TO SURVIVE
— Clementine von Radics
It's kind of like religion. It gives us comfort to believe we have defined something that is, by its very nature, indefinable. As to whether or not we've gotten it right, well, it's all a matter of faith.
— Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep
The simple truth is, not every fight can be won.
— Elyn R. Saks
It has many forms, not all of which look like what you see in movies.
— Carya Cunningham-Sloan
There is nothing more terrifying than a devious person who takes delight in their own mischief
— Taja Zenna
Perhaps she wasn't ill at all in the end, but simply more revealed.
— Charles Lambert, The Children's Home
Most people can only sleep with a nice soft pillow I can only sleep with heavy anti psychotics
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
I was a schizophrenic, not a damn invalid.
— Francesca Zappia, Made You Up
What do you know about bipolar disorder?” I almost say, What do you know about it? But I make myself breathe and smile. “Is that the Jekyll-Hyde thing?” My voice sounds flat and even. Maybe a little bored, even though my mind and body are on alert. “Some people call it manic depression. It’s a brain disorder that causes extreme shifts in mood and energy. It runs in families, but it can be treated.” I continue to breathe, even if I’m not smiling anymore, but here is what is happening: my brain and my heart are pounding out different rhythms; my hands are turning cold and the back of my neck is turning hot; my throat has gone completely dry. The thing I know about bipolar disorder is that it’s a label. One you give crazy people. I know this because I’ve taken junior-year psychology and I’ve seen movies and I’ve watched my father in action for almost eighteen years, even though you could never slap a label on him because he would kill you. Labels like “bipolar” say This is why you are the way you are. This is who you are. They explain people away as illnesses.
— Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places
I thought the doctor's diagnosis was the first step to mending her. I know now that a diagnosis is taken in like an orphaned dog. We brought it home, unsure how to care for it, to live with it. It raised its hackles, snarled, hid in the farthest corner of the room; but it was ours, her diagnosis. The diagnosis was timid and confused, and genetically wired to strike out.
— Christa Parravani
[I have] occasional depersonalization disorder, (which makes me feel utterly detached from reality, but in less of a "this LSD is awesome" kind of way and more of a "I wonder what my face is doing right now" and "it sure would be nice to feel emotions again" sort of thing).
— Jenny  Lawson, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things
Insanity is a very lonely and empty existence - it’s painfully true. They may laugh and smile, and skip and dance, but behind all the faces there is hollowness like a bottomless pit. The living dead, depression is a terrible illness, so is psychosis, the mentally inflicted beyond cure.
— Stephen Richards, Insanity: My Mad Life
After college, I went through my own shit and decided that all physical suffering in the world couldn't compare to mental anguish. And when I got myself, I decided to help other people.
— Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story
I am but a man attempting to be graceful as I slowly decend into madness.
— Danny Bunyavong
I again invoke my favorite analogy for eating disorders: abusive lovers. And what do you do when someone is in an abusive relationship? You don’t allow visitation rights, weekly dates. You don’t put them in the vicinity of or let the abuser flirt with them. You keep them the fuck away.
— Kelsey Osgood, How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia
This is what labels do. They stick. If people think you're MAD, then everything you do, everything you think will have MAD stamped across it.
— Nathan Filer
When Gran finally came home she stepped into the house and wept. She grabbed Sophie and I to her and cried, “Oh my dears…” and though Gran was usually a harsh woman and we were uncomfortable with her affection, we were grateful for it this day. In the months she was gone we realized she was what held us all together. Broken or not, crazy or not—Gran kept us and made us a family. Truly she did.
— Monika Basile
There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.
— Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive
The young and the old are defenseless against relatives who want to get rid of them by casting them in the role of mental patient,and against psychiatrists whose livelihood depends on defining them as mentally ill.
— Thomas Szasz, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted
I've accepted the fact I have mental illness but when my imaginary friends start calling me crazy that's where I draw the line
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
The term 'deinstitutionalization' conceals some simple truths, namely, that old, unwanted persons, formerly housed in state hospitals, are now housed in nursing homes; that young, unwanted persons, formerly also housed in state hospitals, are now housed in prisons or parapsychiatric facilities; and that both groups of inmates are systematically drugged with psychiatric medications.
— Thomas Szasz, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted
I found my way home, stripped naked, and lay on the bathroom floor, the cool tiles pushing up. Keeping me from falling. I didn't know how long the floor would hold me. I prayed Ellen would come home...
— Juliann Garey, Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See
The measure of a man, or a woman for that matter, is not so much how much they have done, but what they have overcome to do what they have done. My favorite poets have said:"Do not go gentle into that good night!"-Dylan Thomas"...fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance ran..."-Rudyard Kipling
— MR Leif N Gregersen II
Unlike ‘mere’ medical or physical disorders, mental disorders are not just problems. If successfully navigated, they can also present opportunities. Simply acknowledging this can empower people to heal themselves and, much more than that, to grow from their experiences.
— Neel Burton, The Meaning of Madness
A vast amount of psychiatric effort has been, and continues to be, devoted to legal and quasi-legal activities. In my opinion, the only certain result has been the aggrandizement of psychiatry. The value to the legal profession and to society as a whole of psychiatric help in administering the criminal law, is, to say the least, uncertain. Perhaps society has been injured, rather than helped, by the furor psychodiagnosticus and psychotherapeuticus in criminology which it invited, fostered, and tolerated.
— Thomas Szasz, Law, Liberty and Psychiatry
The main reason why clinicians may not diagnose personality disorders is that they think that doing so supports therapeutic pessimism. Recent research has shown this is not true; most patients get better, either with time or with treatment, that the prognosis is actually better than in many patients with severe mood and anxiety disorders.
— Joel Paris
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, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted
If two people with no symptoms in common can both receive the same diagnosis of schizophrenia, then what is the value of that label in describing their symptoms, deciding their treatment, or predicting their outcome, and would it not be more useful simply to describe their problems as they actually are? And if schizophrenia does not exist in nature, then how can researchers possibly find its cause or correlates? If psychiatric research has made so little progress in recent decades, it is in large part because everyone has been barking up the wrong tree. It is not a question of getting a bigger and better scanner, but of going right back to the drawing board.What’s more, medical-type labels can be as harmful as they are hollow. By reducing rich, varied, and complex human experiences to nothing more than a mental disorder, they not only sideline and trivialize those experiences but also imply an underlying defect that then serves as a pseudo-explanation for the person’s disturbed behaviour. This demeans and disempowers the person, who is deterred from identifying and addressing the important life problems that underlie his distress.
— Neel Burton, The Meaning of Madness
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 Meaning of Madness
To become a fad, a psychiatric diagnosis requires 3 preconditions: a pressing need, an engaging story, and influential prophets. The pressing need arises from the fact that disturbed and disturbing kids are very often encountered in clinical, school, and correctional settings. They suffered and cause suffering to those around them—making themselves noticeable to families, doctors, and teachers. Everyone feels enormous pressure to do something. Previous diagnoses (especially conduct or oppositional disorder) provided little hope and no call to action. In contrast, a diagnosis or childhood Bipolar Disorder creates a justification for medication and for expanded school services. The medications have broad and nonspecific effects that are often helpful in reducing anger, even if the diagnosis is inaccurate.
— Allen Frances
What is actually observed in so-called 'biplar children'? If you read the research reports carefully, they describe broad and persistent emotional dysregulation. Although these children have mood swings, they do not develop manic or hypomanic episodes. They are moody, irritable, oppositional and likely to misbehave—like all children with disruptive behavior disorders. Their grandiose thinking usually consists of little beyond boastfulness. No evidence from genetics, neurobiology, follow-up studies or treatment response shows that this syndrome has anything in common with classical bipolarity.
— Joel Paris, The Intelligent Clinician's Guide to the DSM-5
The fear of not living is a deep, abiding dread of watching your own potential decompose into irredeemable disappointment when 'should be' gets crushed by what is. Sometimes I think it would be easier to die than to face that, because 'what could have been' is much more highly regarded than 'what should have been.' Dead kids are put on pedestals, but mentally ill kids get hidden under the rug.
— Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep
You see demons in the eyes of the world, and the world sees a bottomless pit in yours.
— Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep
They all think medicine should be magic, and they become mad at me when it's not.
— Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep
Everything feels right with the world......and the sad thing is that I know it's a dream. I know it must soon end, and when it does I will be thrust awake into a place where either I'm broken, or the world is broken.
— Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep
The baby was warm against my chest. I knew I was broken too. I wasn't like other people. I was scared and weird and anxious and sad lots of the time, and I didn't know why. My parents thought I was abnormal, I was pretty sure. They said I wasn't, but you don't get sent to a therapist if you're normal.Sometimes we really aren't supposed to be the way we are. It's not good for us. And people don't like it. You've got to change. You've got to try harder and do deep breathing and maybe one day take pills and learn tricks so you can pretend to be more like other people. Normal people. But maybe Vanessa was right, and all those other people were broken too in their own ways. Maybe we all spent too much time pretending we weren't.
— Kenneth Oppel, The Nest
I begin to wonder if David was like me. Seeing monsters everywhere and realizing there aren't enough slingshots in the world to get rid of them.
— Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep
If you can still wipe your own backside then life's not that bad!
— E.J. Plows
Because of my bipolar condition I will have to take anti psychotics until I die but hopefully a handful of them won't be the last thing I taste
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
When you read my poems or quotes remember you're stepping into the mind that steps outside of me
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
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, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted
It can't have been fun to live with somebody whose brain was under siege.
— Darrell Hammond, God, If You're Not Up There, I'm F*cked
We cannot institutionalize helping the "victims" of personal disasters.
— Thomas Szasz, Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted
I do not have a split mind. I am not different people. I am myself, the same self I have always been, the one person I can never escape.
— Nathan Filer
Each of these patients counts on us to help them to the best of our abilities. We have an obligation to them. We shouldn’t turn our backs on them and give up. It’s not fair to them, nor is it fair to ourselves.
— Jason Medina, No Hope for the Hopeless at Kings Park
The scariest thing of all is never knowing what you're suddenly going to believe.
— Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep
Trauma destroys the fabric of time. In normal time you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy or bouncing like a rubber ball from now to then to back again. ... In the traumatic universe the basic laws of matter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be mustard gas.
— David J. Morris, The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
And while a bald head and a looped ribbon were seen as badges of courage and hope, her reluctant vocabulary and vanishing memories advertised mental instability and impending insanity. Those with cancer could expect to be supported by their community. Alice expected to be an outcast.
— Lisa Genova, Still Alice
It got to the point where it became logical: if a woman was fiercely intelligent, outspoken and passionate, I’d look towards her arms for the scars. They were almost always there.
— Sabrina Chapadjiev, Live Through This: On Creativity and Self-Destruction
Mental illness is not something you misunderstand in this era. Get educated because bias is no different than racism.
— Shannon L. Alder
I have suffered pains and torture of all natures. I have heard many say, "I am a survivor." I am not in a boat in a sea of torture awaiting to be rescued. I am a Conqueror, I am a Victor...I am one with myself.I AM FREE!
— Stanley Victor Paskavich
We all feel inadequate very often. It’s only when it gets chronic that it is disturbing to one’s emotions and can get out of hand and make you pretty damn miserable.
— Taylor Caldwell, Testimony of Two Men
Results of two independent factor analyses of the survey responses of more than 2000 English and American citizens parallel these findings (19,33):- fear and exclusion: persons with severe mental illness should be feared and, therefore, be kept out of most communities;- authoritarianism: persons with severe mental illness are irresponsible, so life decisions should be made by others;- benevolence: persons with severe mental illness are childlike and need to be cared for."World Psychiatry. 2002 Feb; 1(1): 16–20.PMCID: PMC1489832Understanding the impact of stigma on people with mental illnessPATRICK W CORRIGAN and AMY C WATSON
— Patrick W. Corrigan
You know how they say that if you think you might be going crazy, it’s proof that you’re not? Well, it’s a lie. One of many they tell you about mental illness.
— Forrest  Carr, A Journal of the Crazy Year
Successful writing is a slow, daily, meticulous form of mental illness.
— Don Roff
Etta, it could be everything, it could be nothing, what you’re making up. You shouldn’t let that bother you.
— Emma Hooper, Etta and Otto and Russell and James
Several themes describe misconceptions about mental illness and corresponding stigmatizing attitudes. Media analyses of film and print have identified three: people with mental illness are homicidal maniacs who need to be feared; they have childlike perceptions of the world that should be marveled; or they are responsible for their illness because they have weak character (29-32)."World Psychiatry. 2002 Feb; 1(1): 16–20.PMCID: PMC1489832Understanding the impact of stigma on people with mental illnessPATRICK W CORRIGAN and AMY C WATSON
— Patrick W. Corrigan
Don't worry, everyone is mentally ill, they just haven’t figured out a name for yours yet.
— Chris Sprudz
While binge drinking is a significant issue, it is likely that many members of the public would be surprised by its categorisation as a mental illness, particularly at the milder end."Public confusion caused by differing understandings of the term 'mental illness'.Jorm AF, Reavley NJ.Aust N Z J Psychiatry. 2012 May;46(5):397-9. PMID: 22535288
— Anthony F. Jorm
I have spent years ... clinging to the understanding that Iwas a defective biological unit .... This may truly be a valuableperspective for those who observe mental illness, but forme, as a subject, this tree bore only dry and tasteless fruit ...I have a chemical imbalance; I really didn't feel thosethings.I have a chemical imbalance; I didn't really experiencethose things.I have a chemical imbalance; I didn't really thinkthose things ...Here is an insight! The entire human drama of love, suffering,ecstasy, and joy, just chemistry.
— D.A. Granger
Sometimes the people around you won't understand your journey. They don't need to, it's not for them.
— Joubert Botha
The Parents, as my mother and father refer to Mr. Finch and Mrs. Finch, are insisting it was an accident, which, I guess, means we're free to mourn him out in the open in a normal, healthy, unstigmatised way. No need to be ashamed or embarrassed since suicide isn't involved.
— Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places
No one would ever say that someone with a broken arm or a broken leg is less than a whole person, but people say that or imply that all the time about people with mental illness.
— Elyn R. Saks
Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still
— Charlotte Brontë
I had people saying 'it's all in your head'. Do you honestly think I want to feel this way?
— Sonia Estrada
Denial and minimizing is often seen in genuine PTSD and, hence, should be a target of detection and measurement.
— Harold V. Hall
The central mechanism of the avoidance mechanism of PTSD is the ego defense of denial
— Frank M. Ochberg, Post-Traumatic Therapy and Victims of Violence
There is clear evidence from internal investigations in the past that some raters actually see themselves as adversaries to veterans. If a claim can be minimized, then the government has saved money, regardless of the need of the veteran. Just recently, the press exposed an official e-mail from a high-level staff person who stated in essence that PTSD diagnosis was becoming too prevalent and offered ways to delay and deflect ratings in order to save the government money.
— Taylor Armstrong
Forgive me for being chipper, but despair is desperately dull.
— Marya Hornbacher
There may not be any romance to mental illness but who needs romance when the preferable route is agency? The prevailing conversation around mental health issues is agency and the lack thereof on the part of the mentally ill. But what do you do if you’re a paid-up member of the mentally ill populace in question? Do you curl up into a ball and give up? No, you look for solutions. Ultimately, it’s about keeping despair at bay and sometimes simple things like running, taking up a hobby, doing charity work, painting or, in my case, writing can be a galvanizing part of the recovery process. Keeping the brain and the body active can give life a semblance of pleasure and hope. This is what writing has done for me. I took every traumatic element of my condition and channelled it into something useful.
— Diriye Osman
Why do they always prescribe thyroid medicine to go with the mental illness cocktails they whip up?
— Stanley Victor Paskavich, Stantasyland: Quips Quotes and Quandaries
I’m afraid to see a psychiatrist about the voices in my head. She might know who they are.
— Stanley Victor Paskavich, Stantasyland: Quips Quotes and Quandaries
Genius by birth, Bipolar by design
— Stanley Victor Paskavich, Stantasyland: Quips Quotes and Quandaries
1 in 5 people have dandruff. 1 in 4 people have mental health problems. I've had both.
— Ruby Wax
Advances in biological knowledge have highlighted the potential chronicity of effects of childhood maltreatment, demonstrating particular life challenges in managing emotions, forming and maintaining healthy relationships, healthy coping, and holding a positive outlook of oneself.
— Christine Wekerle, Childhood Maltreatment