Quotes About Stigma

Mariah put something useful in a nutshell when she said: If white person is lazy around here, it is because they have a poor work ethic. If a black person is lazy, it's because they are black.

it is possible to argue that some people are violent and mentally ill, but it is no longer defensible to argue that people are violent because they are mentally ill.

People who have never been in this downtrodden, impoverished situation can be very unsympathetic because they don't realize what's happening inside. From their secure position—usually in the middle or upper classes—it's easy to call the poor lazy or unmotivated. Such people do not understand the psychological dimension of poverty. The poor have little chance of changing their state without some help from outside.

Just the existence of a single mentally challenged or mentally ill person should make us change any of our theories about the necessity of some kind of correct thinking as the definition of "salvation." Yet we have a history of excluding and torturing people who do not "think" right.

Still, Yolanda appreciated the fact that her meds allowed her to go among other people, who would treat her, when she was medicated, much like they would treat any other big-boned, over-weight girl with straight, mouse-brown hair, who lumbered across floors so heavily that objects rattled and the surfaces of liquid in glasses boiled. It was a relief not to be viewed as someone with special problems.

Why did people say things like that about him, Randall wondered. It was as if someone had started a rumor when he was a baby and by now everybody had heard it. He never seemed strange to himself, despite the conventional wisdom.

She's out of my league, but if she has herpes... That puts us in the same league! The herpes league!

Really? That would be a first. I'm the son of Hades , Jason. I might as well be covered in blood or sewage, the way people treat me. I don't belong anywhere. I'm not even from this century . But that's not enough to set me apart.

Even if she were going crazy, she didn't want to look like she was going crazy.

names that were so bad that when they dared to whisper them (bitch-cunt-whore-poet) to each other beneath the bedclothes, they were like poison in the air.

Fat people weren't supposed to eat anything, but they were especially not supposed to eat confectionery

Hey, disease boy!" Norton shouted. "We know what you got. It's called

Aber nachdem so viele auf dieselbe Art gebrandmarkt worden waren, wurde es zum Symbol eines guten Charaktern. Ein Ehrenzeichen. Ja.

Why must the woman apologize for not having a baby just because she happened to get pregnant? It's as if we think motherhood is the default setting for a woman's life from first period to menopause, and she needs a note from God not to say yes to every zygote that knocks on her door.

We don't like the idea that a man might be severely constrained for life by a single ejaculation. He has places to go and things to do. That a woman's life may be stunted by unwanted childbearing is not so troubling. Childbearing, after all, is what women are for.

I certainly didn't understand something that I learned later from Dr. Kay Jamison, the author of An Unquiet Mind, about her own manic-depression. She has written that it is "a lethal illness, particularly if left untreated, or wrongly treated.

Crazy people who are judged to be harmless are allowed an enormous amount of freedom ordinary people are denied

Violence, especially if you are a woman, is not something spoken about with ease.

There is no easy way to tell other people that you have manic-depressive illness; if there is, I haven't found it.

Within psychiatric circles, if you kill yourself, you earn the right to be considered a "successful" suicide. This is a success one can live without.

Madness is easy to overdramatize and thereby underestimate; it is less easy to convey its capacity to erode identity, disfigure love, and violate trust. The real horror of madness is more subtle and corrosive than its caricature.

No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psychotherapy alone can prevent my manias and depressions.

Do we risk making the world a blander, more homogenized place if we get rid of the genes for manic-depressive illness

Her version of Lowell was not theirs, even when they were discussing the same symptoms; what to her was "mad" was to them another mark of Lowell's genius.