Quotes About Stigma

and he was afraid she was going to get that middle-aged coven-member look cultivated by some older women with long hair.

Obviously, there's the seedy side of the strip club world and pole dancing. But, pole dancing, as an art form, is really beautiful. It's been hyper-sexualized because it's associated with strippers, but if you think about it, just in terms of other kinds of dancing, they're using an instrument to create these amazing dance forms.

Crazy is a state of mind usually interpreted by other people.

What is your definition of skank?' I ask. 'A skank fucks skeezas she barely knows.

felt a prickle at the special horror of being not only ill but also marginalized—your testimony dismissed because your lab work fails to match a preexisting pattern.

our culture tends to psychologize diseases it doesn't yet understand

Tara's already been called a lesbian because that's how the Sebastian boys deal with any girl who has an opinion.

It is true that my shunning was a message from our community to my mother. Her rejection of me was a measure of the humiliation she felt. She believed until her death that I caused her to lose her friends and her stature in the town.

White women who suffer from mental illness are depicted as idle, spoiled, or just plain hysterical. Black men are demonized and pathologized. Black women with psychological problems are certainly not seen as geniuses; we are generally not labeled 'hysterical' or 'eccentric' or even 'pathological'. When a black woman suffers from a mental disorder, the overwhelming opinion is that she is weak. And weakness in black women is intolerable.

I've frequently been told things like: "Girl, you've been hanging out with too many white folk" ; "What do you have to be depressed about? If our people could make it through slavery, we can make it through anything" ; "Take your troubles to Jesus, not no damn psychiatrist.

I can feel the sensation (it burns) of being called crazy when you feel wounded and desperate.

in the work of R. D. Laing, who questioned the social construction of mental illness: "Setting the sick apart sustains the fantasy that we are whole." The

If only he can get over becoming a NERD.

People understand this about physical disabilities. Someone with a broken leg will not, for that reason alone, be denied a job that requires typing. We are comfortable with the idea that physical health is not just a single number but a multiplicity of factors. That's where we need to arrive about mental problems, too.

But the label 'crazy' bothers me. Annoys me. Because it prevents response." When someone asks if you're crazy, Knight lamented, you can either say yes, which makes you crazy, or you can say no, which makes you sound defensive, as if you fear that you really are crazy. There's no good answer.

Imagine someone sitting alone in a room without television, radio, computer or phone and with the door closed and the blinds down. This person must be a dangerous lunatic or a prisoner sentenced to solitary confinement. If a free agent, then a panty-sniffing loser shunned by society, or a psycho planning to return to college with an automatic weapon and a backpack full of ammo.

The current leadership of the Labor party react to the idea that working-class students might study the subjects they studied with the same horror that the Earl of Grantham showed when a chauffeur wanted to marry his daughter.

The "less educated are seen as responsible and blameworthy for their situation, even by the less-educated themselves.

I think the greatest taboos in America are faith and failure.

If a woman enjoyed sex, or expressed her sexuality outwardly she was automatically a slut with no respect for herself. Sex was a favor you allowed your husband so angels wouldn't curse you until morning.

I feel sorry for hookers these days—how do they stand out anymore?

I've been called a skank, a whore, a whinger, and a slut.

No one in France cares if you tried to kill yourself. In fact, I think they like you better because you're all tragic.

When did being single become a disease?