Quotes About Illness

Sometimes," says a fellow depressive, "I wish I was in a full body cast, with every bone in my body broken. That's how I feel anyway. Then, maybe, people would stop minimising my illness because they can actually see what's wrong with me. They seem to need physical evidence.

Wanting to die (or 'suicidal ideation'as the experts would have it) goes hand in hand with the illness. It is a symptom of severe depression, not a character failing or moral flaw. Nor is it, truly, a desire to die so much as a fervent wish not to go on living. All depressives understand that distinction.

A friend called the other day. 'How are you?' she said. The sun was shining, the sky a merciless blue. It was only eleven in the morning but I had been awake since three twenty. I was in bed because, as usual, I could think of nowhere else to go. I said that I was feeling low. Low is the depressive's euphemism for despair. She said: 'How can you be depressed on a day like this?' I wanted to say: 'If I had flu, would you ask me how I could be sick on a day like this?

Bad enough to be ill, but to feel compelled to deny the very thing that, in its worst and most active state, defines you is agony indeed.

Sometimes I think depression should be called the coping illness. So many of us struggle on, not daring or knowing how to ask for help. More of us, terribly, go undiagnosed.

We are not easy to help. Nor are we easy to be around. Nobody with a serious illness is easy to be around. Although not obviously physically disabled, we struggle to get things done. Our energy levels are dangerously low. Sometimes, we find it hard to talk. We get angry and frustrated. We fall into despair. We cry, for no apparent reason. Sometimes we find it difficult to eat, or to sleep. Often, we have to go to bed in the afternoon or all day.

Why do they call it a 'mental' illness? The pain isn't just in my head; it's everywhere, but mainly at my throat and in my heart. Perhaps my heart is broken.

It is not that science is failing us. It is simply that the solution is as complex and multifaceted as the illness itself. For every theory of its causes, there is another to contradict it; for every new treatment, there is another that dismisses it as ineffective. This is not deliberate obstruction. Depressive illness, as well as being complex, is highly individual. What works for one person does not work for another. And often there is no explanation why this is so.

I am growing to hate the vague declarations of psychiatric treatment, the airy cross-your-fingers pronouncements. The treatment of mental health is an inexact science. But, as I am slowly coming to understand, depression is an inexact illness.

In opposition to this detachment, he finds an image of man which contains within itself man's dreams, man's illness, man's redemption from the misery of poverty - poverty which can no longer be for him a sign of the acceptance of life.

It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window.

Lee was my father's lawyer, a mensch. But he's been very sick. Cancer. Pancreatic." "That's one of the worst. A killer." "Yes, the ones that kill you are definitely the worst. [...]

I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.

But I could not stay with him myself, for having got a great cold by my playing the fool in the water yesterday I was in great pain, and so went home by coach to bed, and went not to the office at all, and by keeping myself warm, I broke wind and so came to some ease. Rose and eat some supper, and so to bed again.

The patient is the one with the disease

The main source of illness in this world is the doctor's own illness: his compulsion to try to cure and his fraudulent belief that he can.

Gray had not gotten better.

I thank God for this illness and these physical discomforts, because I have the time to converse with the Lord Jesus.

I'd been ill and hadn't trained for a week and I'd been out of the team for three weeks before that, so I wasn't sharp. I got cramp before half-time as well. But I'm not one to make excuses.

A death from a long illness is very different from a sudden death. It gives you time to say goodbye and time to adjust to the idea that the beloved will not be with you anymore.

Being ill like this combines shock - this time I will die - with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself.

Please believe that I do this because I am convinced that my illness cannot be helped for any length of time and I cannot bear to be a burden on anyone any longer.

Several very good friends of mine have died of AIDS. I spent a great deal of time with them when they went through that process.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.