Quotes About Stigma

They have what you call a black night where they have black people come in for just one night only to watch comedy, and you get all your local drug dealers, thugs, prostitutes, all of them come in, sit down, and listen to you tell jokes. They the hardest people to make laugh.

From the moment you enter the league, everyone wants to slap a label on you - some tidy description of what they think you bring to the game. And more often than not, that tag sticks with you, regardless of whether it's accurate.

I felt like a failure, like somehow my self-worth was tied to my ability to procreate. I didn't feel like I could talk about it. I did not want other people's pity, so I mostly kept my story and my feelings to myself.

The anger and shame of these women I hold in one hand, and the basin in the other. The distance between the two, the length I pace and try to measure, is the size of an abortion.

Killing oneself is, anyway, a misnomer. We don't kill ourselves. We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval, "He fought so hard." And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong.

Sometimes I think depression should be called the coping illness. So many of us struggle on, not daring or knowing how to ask for help. More of us, terribly, go undiagnosed.

I find it easy to spot a depressive. The illness is scrawled across them like graffiti.

I know how it feels to be told that it's all in your mind. It drives you mad.

If someone called me fat, that affects me way more than someone calling me a f----t. I think just because I've accepted that, if someone calls me a f----t, it's like, I am gay and I'm proud to be gay so there's no issues there. If something calls you fat, that's something I want to change.

I feel the same way about disco as I do about herpes." Hunter S. Thompson

The woman's a whore, and there's an end on 't.

What were you in a mental hospital for?" "Depression. But it was a long time ago.

I think one of the great dangers faced by women over sixty in this country is starving to death in a restaurant. We were invisible.

There's nothing short of reincarnation that can change poor white trash into something respectable.

it is dangerous to be perceived as dangerous.

It's a pity that virgins can't be issued with some kind of barcode. Think of the problems that would have saved you.

Contrary to what Comstock and the physicians on the jury seemed to believe, women in distress could find a way to end an unwanted pregnancy, so long as they could pay for it. For every case that came to public view because something went terribly wrong, there were a hundred or more that remained a private matter.

Generally people believed that an abandoned child was illegitimate and that the mother had put it away from her to hide an inexcusable moral

When you're struggling to survive, no one gets to label you a coward, not even you yourself in your private thoughts.

She hated their new nickname. It made them sound like deranged Barbie dolls.

accept what you've already learned: that your disability will come and go and you'll never control it completely. Educate yourself about it, become an expert manager, and use treatment whenever you think it's necessary and without regard to your yearnings to be normal. Fight the shame that comes with being ill by sharing as much with others as you think is appropriate according to your own standards of privacy, not the culture's stigma.

For years the league has thought I've been on drugs. I would have burned out a long time ago if that was true.

When I was 9 or 10 years old it wasn't the thing to be seen doing - reading a book in your spare time.

At the time, 1980, people regarded actresses involved with production with a certain amount of fear, resentment and anger.