Quotes from Andrew Solomon

Psychosis is a gross disturbance in an individual's ability to distinguish self from reality. For schizophrenics, the membrane between imagination and reality is so porous that having an idea and having an experience are not particularly different.

Is it crazy to avoid the behaviours that make you crazy? Or is it crazy to medicate so that you can sustain a life that makes you crazy?

You can't fit in with people by pretending to be just like they are; you fit in by engaging in a dialogue about your differences, and by putting aside the assumption that your way of life is in any way preferable to theirs.

Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason. These fortune-cookie admonitions sound pat, but the surest way out of depression is to dislike it and not to let yourself grow accustomed to it. Block out the terrible thoughts that invade your mind.

With the wonder and bitterness of someone pardoned for a crime she did not commit I come back to marriage and friends, to pink fringed hollyhocks; come back to my desk, books, and chair.

El analfabetismo y la pobreza son discapacidades, como también lo son la imbecilidad, la obesidad y la apatía.

In his classic work Stigma, Erving Goffman argues that identity is formed when people assert pride in the thing that made them marginal, enabling them to achieve personal authenticity and political credibility.

The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote, "It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it is our optimism or pessimism that makes our ideas.

We do not seek painful experiences that adhere to our identities but rather we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences

El analfabetismo y la pobreza son discapacidades, como también lo son la imbecilidad, la obesidad y la apatía. La fe es una discapacidad en la medida en que restringe el interés personal; el ateísmo es una discapacidad, puesto que es una coraza contra la esperanza. Incluso el poder puede considerarse una discapacidad por el aislamiento al que condena a quienes lo ejercen.

Let me bury here the rage I feel to have been twice robbed: once of the child I wanted, and once of the son I loved.

We can endure great pain if we believe it's purposeful.

As organs go, the brain is quite an important one, and its malfunctions should be addressed accordingly. Chemistry

Forge meaning, build identity and then invite the world to share your joy

Oppression breeds the power to oppose it

It is my experience that the hard numbers are the ones that lie. The matters that they describe cannot be defined so clearly. The most accurate statement that can be made on the frequency of depression is that it occurs often and, directly or indirectly, affects the lives of everyone. It

The danger is that being pushed towards early specialisation can leave children believing that they have only one way to succeed...Prodigies who don't make it will have worked insanely hard on something that can longer sustain them, after having neglected skills needed to pursue any other kind of life.

We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful.

Much gets corrected that might better have been left alone.

There's always somebody who wants to confiscate our humanity. And there are always stories that restore it

All I know is what I have words for." The absence of words is the absence of intimacy; these experiences are starved for language.

There is no contradiction between loving someone and feeling burdened by that person; indeed, love tends to magnify the burden. These parents need space for their ambivalence, whether they can allow it for themselves or not. For those who love, there should be no shame in being exhausted—even in imagining another life.

Having exceptional children exaggerates parental tendencies; those who would be bad parents become awful parents, but those who would be good parents often become extraordinary.

We learn so much from our children—in patience, in humility, in gratitude for other blessings we had accepted before as a matter of course; so much in tolerance; so much in faith—believing and trusting where we cannot see; so much in compassion for our fellow man; and yes, even so much in wisdom about the eternal values in life.