Mental Illness Quotes - Page 5

• We share in the certainty that people labeled with mental illness are first and above all, human beings. Our lives are precious and are of infinite value.

  Patricia Deegan

  Inspirational, People, Firsts

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• The family unit is the institution for the systematic production of mental illness.

  Ashley Montagu

  Systematic, Institutions, Units

  "The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson",

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• People get really irritated by mental illness.

  Maria Bamford

  People, Irritated, Get Real

  "Stand-up Comedy and Mental Illness: A Conversation with Maria Bamford". Interview with David Haglund, www.slate.com. May 10, 2012.

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• Even with all that - excellent treatment, wonderful family and friends, supportive work environment - I did not make my illness public until relatively late in life, and that's because the stigma against mental illness is so powerful that I didn't feel safe with people knowing. If you hear nothing else today, please hear this: There are not 'schizophrenics'. There are people with schizophrenia, and these people may be your spouse, they may be your child, they may be your neighbor, they may be your friend, they may be your coworker.

  Elyn Saks

  Children, Powerful, Knowing

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• Then it is in me, too, the psychotic streak. A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? And-how many of us do know it? ... Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally. Waking up. I suppose only a few are aware of all this. Isolated persons here and there. But the broad masses-what do they think? All these hundreds of thousands in this city, here. Do they imagine that they live in a sane world? Or do they guess, glimpse, the truth...?

  Philip K. Dick

  Depression, Thinking, Cities

  Philip K. Dick (2007). “Four novels of the 1960s”

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• ... you looked around and saw everybody either married or busy and happy and thinking and being creative, and you felt scared, sick, lethargic, worst of all, not wanting to cope. You saw visions of yourself in a straightjacket, and a drain on the family, murdering your mother in actuality, killing the edifice of love and respect built up over the years in the hearts of other people.

  Sylvia Plath

  Depression, Mother, Heart

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.87, Anchor

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• But what is madness, if not being able to control your own mind?

  Lady Victoria Leatham

  Depression, Mind, Able

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• The body's pain is so paper-thin and insignificant compared to that of the mind.

  Peter Høeg

  Depression, Pain, Mind

  Peter Høeg (2010). “Smilla's Sense of Snow: A Novel”, p.501, Macmillan

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• Though many schizophrenics become curiously attached to their delusions, the fading of the nondelusional world puts them in loneliness beyond all reckoning, a fixed residence on a noxious private planet they can never leave, and where they can receive no visitors.

  Andrew Solomon

  Depression, Loneliness, Fading

  Andrew Solomon (2014). “Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity”, p.296, Simon and Schuster

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• It is a negative sort of achievement, she thinks, to have spent a life warding something off.

  Adam Haslett

  Depression, Thinking, Achievement

  Adam Haslett (2002). “You are Not a Stranger Here”, Bantam Dell Publishing Group

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• And all that weirdness isn't just going on outside. It's in you too, right now, growing in the dark like magic mushrooms. Call it the Thing in the Cellar. Call it the Blow Lunch Factor. Call it the Loony Tunes File. I think of it as my private dinosaur, huge, slimy, and mindless, stumbling around in the stinking swamp of my subconscious, never finding a tar pit big enough to hold it.

  Stephen King

  Depression, Dark, Blow

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• I see myself as one would see another.
  I have been cut in two.

  Anne Sexton

  Cutting, Two, Has Beens

  Anne Sexton, Diane Wood Middlebrook, Diana Hume George (2000). “Selected Poems of Anne Sexton”, p.92, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Wanting to be on television is a mental illness. Wanting to be president of the United States, wanting to be an actor - these are degrees of the same mental illness. If you need to be approved of simultaneously by more people than are in this room now, there's a problem.

  Keith Olbermann

  People, President, Actors

  Source: www.gq.com

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• The soul is innocent and immortal, it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse.

  Allen Ginsberg

  Depression, Soul, Innocent

  Allen Ginsberg, Lewis Hyde (1984). “On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg”, p.391, University of Michigan Press

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• And I just can't live in this present. I would go mad if I did.

  John Fowles

  Depression, Mad, Ifs

  John Fowles (1963). “The collector”

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• The funny part of it all is that relatively few people seem to go crazy, relatively few even a little crazy or even a little weird, relatively few, and those few because they have nothing to do that is to say they have nothing to do or they do not do anything that has anything to do with the war only with food and cold and little things like that.

  Gertrude Stein

  War, Crazy, People

  Gertrude Stein (2013). “Wars I Have Seen”, p.117, Random House

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• It's enough just to speak when spoken to, to give some minimal reaction to a stimulus. But to actually be the stimulus doesn't even occur to me.

  Martha Manning

  Depression, Giving, Speak

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• I yearned to get better; I told myself I was getting better. In fact, the depression was still there, like a powerful undertow. Sometimes it grabbed me, yanked me under; other times, I swam free.

  Tracy Thompson

  Depression, Powerful, Get Better

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• Those who try to "break on through to the other side" not only cannot predict what they may find there, but are themselves too often broken in the process.

  Charles Shaar Murray

  Depression, Broken, Trying

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• Man is not merely the sum of his masks. Behind the shifting face of personality is a hard nugget of self, a genetic gift.... The self is malleable but elastic, snapping back to its original shape like a rubber band. Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae.

  Camille Paglia

  Men, Self, Personality

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays”, p.100, Vintage

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• I'm an empress.
  I wear an apron.
  My typewriter writes.
  It didn't break the way it warned.
  Even crazy, I'm as nice
  as a chocolate bar.

  Anne Sexton

  Crazy, Nice, Writing

  Anne Sexton, Diane Wood Middlebrook, Diana Hume George (2000). “Selected Poems of Anne Sexton”, p.118, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Most people are sick. But only a few know that this is something they can be proud of. These are the psychoanalysts.

  Karl Kraus

  People, Sick, Proud

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms”

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• I get lots of awards for being mentally ill. Apparently, I am better at being mentally ill than almost anything else I've ever done. Seriously - I have a shelf of awards for being bipolar.

  Carrie Fisher

  Awards, Bipolar, Done

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• When one of us dies of cancer, loses her mind, or commits suicide, we must not blame her for her inability to survive an ongoing political mechanism bent on the destruction of that human being. Sanity remains defined simply by the ability to cope with insane conditions.

  Ana Castillo

  Suicide, Cancer, Political

  Ana Castillo (1995). “Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma”, Plume Books

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• It sure is boring to be around people who are in character all the time. I always find it's closer to mental illness than acting excellence.

  William H. Macy

  Character, People, Excellence

  Source: www.esquire.com

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