Quotes About Mental health

tragic and painful state of being separated from his true self, to which doctors refer offhandedly as depression.

Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery of our truth about the unique history of our childhood.

This is an astounding statement, because I know of literally no one who suffers from psychic symptoms and seeks treatment for them without having at least been beaten and humiliated in childhood.

In contrast, there are those with great gifts, often precisely the most gifted, who do suffer from severe depression. For one is free from it only when self-esteem is based on the authenticity of ones own feelings and not on the possession of certain qualities.

If we suppress them, feelings can indeed hide themselves from the conscious mind, but they frequently resurface in the form of bodily symptoms, which conceal their real content and intensity, making it much more difficult to deal with them than it would be if they were admitted to consciousness.

That is pretty well what the doctor said, in a lot more careful words. He says that the pills he's got her on will keep her from sinking too low. How low is too low, Roy thinks, and when can you tell?

A foot. Remember how DuBois saw those human feet in a butcher's window in downtown Atlanta? Brother, Sister, Children, you are not crazy to feel crazy here.

It is a way of saying you must not live too much in your head. It is a way of reminding you to stay in your emotions, no matter how nutty they are; it is a way of saying, also, that craziness has value.

Child abuse isn't evil because it may produce neurotic adults but because it abuses children.

People drink alcohol and take drugs to try to feel how happy people feel normally.

Smoking creates an artificial feeling of insecurity and emptiness.

W]ay too much treatment is given to the normal worried well who are harmed by it; far too little help is available for those who are really ill and desperately need it. Two thirds of people with severe depression don't get treated for it, and many suffering with schizophrenia wind up in prisons. The writing is on the wall.

The great unspoken paradox of the arduous process of psychoanalysis is that the best patients are the ones who never really needed it in the first place. Abnormal

Taking a pill is passive. In contrast, psychotherapy puts the patient in charge by instilling new coping skills and attitudes toward life.

It is equally dangerous at either extreme - to have either an expanding concept of mental disorder that eliminates normal or to have an expanding concept of normal that eliminates mental disorder.

A ranting psychotic is far enough away from mean to be recognized as mentally sick by your aunt Tilly, but how do you decide when everyday anxiety or sadness is severe enough to be considered mental disorder? One thing does seem perfectly clear. On the statistical face of it, it is ridiculous to stretch disorder so elastically that the near average person can qualify. Shouldn't most people be normal?

D]iagnosis needed to rest in order to let research catch up. It made no sense to keep rearranging the furniture of descriptive psychiatry, creating new diagnoses or altering the thresholds of existing ones, based only on the whims of the experts who happened to be in the room. [...] Changes in diagnoses should be few and far between until we gained much deeper understanding of what causes the mental disorders and how best to define and treat them.

T]he DSM alone does not establish standards. Physicians, other mental health workers, drug companies, advocacy groups, school systems, the courts, the Internet, and cable TV all get to vote on how the written word will actually be used and misused.

Our classification of mental disorders is no more than a collection of fallible and limited constructs that seeks but never finds the truth - but this remains our best current way of communicating about, treating, and researching mental disorders. [...] It is good to know and use the DSM definitions, but not to reify or worship them.

Psychiatric disorder consists of symptoms and behaviors that are not self-correcting - a breakdown in the normal homeostatic healing process. Diagnostic inflation occurs when we confuse the typical perturbations that are part of everyone's life with true psychiatric disorder[.]

I'm with you in Rockland where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss

Zach," I said as I lay there "Where did you go? When you were looking for me?" I shifted in his arms, looked into his eyes. "Crazy." His voice was a whisper against my skin. "I went crazy.

ever deeper into jealous depression. They tell you drink makes you happy, but what they mean is it makes happy folk happier. They don't tell you that it makes unhappy folk more fucking unhappy than ever.

The mad sometimes drilled holes in their own heads to let the demons out. To relieve the pressure of thoughts they could no longer bear. Jude understood the impulse. Each beat of his heart was a fresh and staggering blow felt in the nerves behind his eyes and in his temples. Punishing evidence of life.