Quotes About Stigma

Choosing to put a chemical into your body should not be a crime, and being addicted should not be a crime. Instead, all the money spent on arresting, trying, and punishing addicts should be transferred to educating kids and helping addicts to recover.

In the drug war, we guarantee addicts will find it almost impossible to work again, by marking them with the scarlet letter of a criminal record. After the drug war, we will make it easier to employ recovering addicts, with subsidies—because we understand this will keep them from relapsing more effectively than the threat of being caged.

people will never choose to bring drugs into the legal realm of regulation so long as they believe they are demonic substances that hijack most of their users and destroy them. When they discover that these drugs are in fact less dangerous than alcohol, and addiction is caused mainly by trauma and isolation rather than the drug itself, they will be more receptive to new approaches.

Others are run by people like the man I met in L.A. who too often seem to be playing out their own traumas and internal stigma on people too raw and fragile to argue back.

In most cases, Joanne says, we would have to stop talking about "mental health"—which conjures pictures of brain scans and defective synapses—and start talking about "emotional health." "Why do we call it mental health?" she asked me. "Because we want to scientize it. We want to make it sound scientific. But it's our emotions.

Every man bears something within him that, if it were publicly announced, would excite feelings of aversion.

I am not ashamed to confess it; for I have learned, by my own experience, that all extraordinary men, who have accomplished great and astonishing actions, have ever be decried by the world as drunken or insane.

For some reason, we see divorce as a signal of failure, despite the fact that each of us has a right, and an obligation, to rectify any other mistake we make in life.

I did this role in Life Goes On as an HIV positive character and so emotionally that was the most challenging.

I mean it's very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America. People think you're a freak if you try to.

All my life people have made fun of me because I was so skinny. They kind of made me feel bad about it sometimes. I worried that maybe people will think I am really anorexic.

My weight and my pant size are the absolute last thing I'm concerned about. People who talk and judge pregnant women's weight need to get a life!

I have lived my life in a culture that hates fat people.

Every other day there's something - I'm dealing drugs, I'm starving people. I have never done a drug in my life.

Nothing defines the quality of life in a community more clearly than people who regard themselves, or whom the consensus chooses to regard, as mentally unwell.

Not everyone who's homeless is a drug-addict or in need of mental health care. Some are normal people who've been knocked down, and it can happen to you, too. Not all of us made bad life choices.

But if I am a criminal, am I, then, an addict? Am I, then, a failure?

There was a girl. Her name was Angie. She was fat.

I, though less optimistic, had supposed that knowledge would bring understanding. We had not realized that what the public loathes in homosexuality is not the thing itself but having to think about it

What do you think of boybands?" I avoided eye contact, put my hands in my pockets, and shrugged. "Not my thing, really." What was he getting at? He chortled, and continued. "They are all the same. They've all got a lead singer whose head is stuck up his own arse, then a hard one who gets into trouble, an ugly one who wants to be taken seriously, and always, without exception, there's a gay one.

Suppose a boy steals an apple From the tray at the grocery store, And they all begin to call him a thief, The editor, minister, judge, and all the people – «A thief», «a thief», «a thief», wherever he goes. And he can't get work, and he can't get bread Without stealing it, why the boy will steal. It's the way people regard the theft of an apple That makes the boy what he is.

A look at Chinese history showed that some of China's ablest patriots were at one time or another labeled bandits.

and various forms of mental illness, including evangelical Protestantism.

A married daughter with children puts you in danger of being catalogued as a first edition.