Quotes About Stigma

We knew you were gone. We figured out it was something problematic. But mum was the word." According to Margie Pielsticker, "All of a sudden she was gone. We were told that she was at home, sick. No one knew why. Those were the years when you didn't talk about mental illness.

While the effects of negative labels such as "lazy" and "stupid" may be more obvious, even a positive or an apparently neutral label such as "cook" limits our perception of the totality of another person's being.

People with [Chronic Fatigue] who kill themselves are the millenium's favorite type of disabled citizens-- those who will walk quietly among the healthy, then quietly dispose of themselves.

If you are physically sick, you can elicit the interest of a battery of physicians; but if you are mentally sick, you are lucky if the janitor comes around.

Ten years ago, when I was on an airplane and I introduced myself to my seatmate, and told them [I was a psychologist], they'd move away from me. … And now when I tell people what I do, they move toward me.

People in the States used to think that if girls were good at sports their sexuality would be affected.

From now on, I'm telling everyone I meet I'm in insurance. Or I'm a car dealer. Better yet—a Republican. That way, when they accuse me of doing the Devil's work, at least there will be some validity to their claims.

I'll tell you why we make fun of midgets: We're not afraid of them.

It is only poverty that makes celibacy contemptible. A single woman of good fortune is always respectable.

Long ago they lowered insane persons into snake pits; they thought that an experience that might drive a sane person out of his wits might send an insane person back into sanity.

A STUDY shows that if an American schizophrenic hears voices, they tell him to commit violence. And if a schizophrenic in India hears voices, they tell him to clean the house.

He kept telling me I was queer, and I didn't like it. The word, I mean. Shutting you away, somehow; roping you off with a lot of people you don't feel much in common with, half of whom hate the other half anyway, and just keep together so that they can lean up against each other for support.

I began to feel like I was wearing a sign on my forehead that said FUCKED UP in big neon letters.

Crazy isn´t always what they say it is. It´s not always the old woman wearing sneakers and a skirt and a scarf, wandering around with a shopping cart, hollering at no one, nothing, tumbling through years in her head. No. Sometimes it is a girl wearing boots and jeans and a sweater, arms crossed in front of her, shivering, wandering through the streets at night, all night, murmuring to no one, nothing, tumbling through the strange unreal dimensions in her head.

I mean, we all know the dangers of starving, but bulimia? That can't be that bad. It's only bad when you get really thin. Who worries about bulimics? They're just gross.

The idea began to sink in, more than it ever had, that I might be crazy, in the traditional sense of the word. That I might be, forever and ever amen, a Crazy Person. That's what we'd suspected all along, what I'd been working so hard to disprove, what might be true. I preferred, by far, being dead.

I have a word. Now it will be better. Now it has a name, and if it has a name, it's a real thing, not merely my imagination gone wild. If it has a name, if it isn't merely an utter failure on my part, if it's a disease, bipolar disorder, then it has an answer. Then it has a cure.

Just because we talk slow doesn't mean we think slow, others point out. On the East Coast they seem to think there's something funny about riding around in a pickup truck. Well in the Deep South, we don't think it's all that natural to hurdle through the dark in a crowded subway.

When you are depressed you feel alone, and that no one is going through quite what you are going through. You are so scared of appearing in any way mad you internalise everything, and you are so scared that people will alienate you further you clam up and don't speak about it, which is a shame, as speaking about it helps.

Talk. Listen. Encourage talking. Encourage listening. Keep adding to the conversation. Stay on the lookout for those wanting to join in the conversation. Keep reiterating, again and again, that depression is not something you 'admit to', it is not something you have to blush about, it is a human experience.

Even more staggeringly, depression is a disease so bad that people are killing themselves because of it in a way they do not kill themselves with any other illness. Yet people still don't really think depression really is that bad. If they did, they wouldn't say the things they say.

I think that basically we are all helping people. All the time. Every time any of us speaks openly about mental health, we are helping normalize an illness that is still handled with protective goggles and safety gloves.

Stigma is particularly cruel for depressives, because stigma affects thoughts and depression is a disease of thoughts.

You are no less or more of a man or a woman or a human for having depression than you would be for having cancer or cardiovascular disease or a car accident.