Quotes About Stigma

Drug addiction and alcoholism, depression and anxiety, accidental pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. These conditions are believed to share a common etiology, the failure of virtue. Whatever their diagnosis, all Wellways patients have this in common: their troubles are seen to be, in part or in full, their own goddam fault.

Labels like "bipolar" say This is why you are the way you are. This is who you are. They explain people away as illnesses.

The Parents, as my mother and father refer to Mr. Finch and Mrs. Finch, are insisting it was an accident, which, I guess, means we're free to mourn him out in the open in a normal, healthy, unstigmatised way. No need to be ashamed or embarrassed since suicide isn't involved.

Suicide victim' is an interesting term. The victim part of it implies they had no choice. And maybe Finch didn't feel like he had a choice...

these kids who never did anything to anyone except be born with different brains and different wiring

I lost my friend to suicide a year before I lost my father to cancer. They were both ill at the same time, and they died within fourteen months of each other, but the reaction to their illnesses and deaths could not have been more different. People rarely bring flowers to a suicide.

He mutters something that sounds like and probably is fat whore. It doesn't matter that I'm a virgin. I should have had sex a thousand times by now for all the boys who've been calling me this since fifth grade.

I want to get away from the stigma they all clearly feel just because they have a n illness of the mind as opposed to, say, an illness of the lungs or blood. I want to get away from all the labels, "I'm OCD," "I'm depressed," "I'm a cutter," they say, like these are the things that define them.

Every forty seconds, someone in the world dies by suicide. Every forty seconds, someone is left behind to cope with the loss.

The thing I don't say is: I want to stay alive. The reason I don't say it is because, given that fat folder in front of him, he'd never believe it. And here's something else he'd never believe--I'm fighting to be here in this shitty, messed-up world. Standing on the ledge of the bell tower isn't about dying. It's about having control.

In comic books, people with gifts became superheroes; in real life they became outcasts.

Sexual assault is the single least-reported violent crime. And when it is reported, the victims are blamed and shamed.

I may be a faggot," he said clearly, "but at least I'm not a moron, an asshole, or a rednecked motherfucker.

The stigma of oddness is the price a myopic world always exacts of genius.

anti-Jewish material is repeated, because no one questions it.

It is unthinkable for a Frenchman to arrive at middle age without having syphilis and the Cross of the Legion of Honor.

No woman could have been Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized.

You get born as a boy and then you just end up messing everything just to be a girl. In the end, nobody supports you and you die as a miserable no one. End of story."

I mean, if there was any justice in the world you wouldn't even have to go to school during your period.

To be honest, she may be kind of scared of the register. Or maybe she can't add. She is a Christian. I don't think they believe in math.

Truly Christ blessed the lepers and the whores, but there is no comfort in the Bible for boys with small winks, and they are the most shunned of all.

Oh—I discovered venereal warts on my ass last week. Had them burned off by Dr. Jones, in that VD Mill he runs on Lexington Avenue; if you went to him with a broken leg, he'd tell you it was syphilis—too too depressing/cheers.

I don't have a definition for depression. I'm productive, and that's not a sign of depression, right? And I don't have weeks where I don't leave my bed. It seems like depressed people have those.

The guilt I felt for having a mental illness was horrible. I prayed for a broken bone that would heal in six weeks. But that never happened. I was cursed with an illness that nobody could see and nobody knew much about.