Quotes About Mental health

Being deeply lonely seemed to cause as much stress as being punched by a stranger.

Depression isn't a disease; depression is a normal response to abnormal life experiences!

It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.

Antidepressant drugs that increase serotonin in the brain have the same modest effect, in clinical trials, as drugs that reduce serotonin in the brain.

Becoming acutely lonely, the experiment found, was as stressful as experiencing a physical attack.

Later, one of the world's leading medical journals, the Lancet, conducted a detailed study of the fourteen major antidepressants that are given to teenagers. The evidence—from the unfiltered, real results—showed that they simply didn't work, with a single exception, where the effect was very small.

When the results came back and were all calculated out, Tim was struck by the results: materialistic people, who think happiness comes from accumulating stuff and a superior status, had much higher levels of depression and anxiety.

Rufus tells his patients when they come to him feeling deeply depressed or anxious: You're not crazy to feel so distressed. You're not broken. You're not defective. He sometimes quotes the Eastern philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti,26 who explained: "It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.

But I was going to learn that neither of these stories is true. The primary cause of all this rising depression and anxiety is not in our heads. It is, I discovered, largely in the world, and the way we are living in it. I learned there are at least nine proven causes of depression and anxiety (although nobody had brought them together like this before), and many of them are rising all around us—causing us to feel radically worse.

After twenty years researching this at the highest level, Irving has come to believe that the notion depression is caused by a chemical imbalance is just "an accident of history," produced by scientists initially misreading what they were seeing, and then drug companies selling that misperception to the world to cash in.

Scientists measure the depth of someone's depression using something named the Hamilton scale, which was invented by a scientist named Max Hamilton in 1959. The Hamilton scale ranges from 0 (where you're skipping along merrily) to 51 (where you're jumping in front of trains). To give you a yardstick: you can get a six-point leap in your Hamilton score if you improve your sleeping patterns

Loneliness, he concluded, is causing a significant amount of the depression and anxiety in our society.

Mental health is produced socially: the presence or absence of mental health is above all a social indicator and therefore requires social, as well as individual, solutions.

How could I still be depressed when I was taking antidepressants? I was doing everything right, and yet something was still wrong. Why?

Depression and anxiety might, in one way, be the sanest reaction you have.6 It's a signal, saying—you shouldn't have to live this way, and if you aren't helped to find a better path, you will be missing out on so much that is best about being human.

And many of our scientists imagine the root cause of addiction can be found on a brain scan, in a society that is falling apart, where many people have no friends, where they are taught life is all about buying things and showing them off on Instagram, where they are experiencing more and more humiliation as each day passes.

In a world that thinks there's no such thing as society, the idea that our depression and anxiety have social causes will seem incomprehensible. It's like talking in ancient Aramaic to a twenty-first-century kid.

One study of depressed people in Norway found that a program like this moved people on average 4.5 points on the depression scale—more than double the effect of chemical antidepressants.

My desire for a solution that was private and personal - the psychological equivalent of a pill - was in fact a symptom of the mindset that had caused my depression and anxiety in the first place.

The stunning thing was that loneliness is not merely the result of depression," he told me. "Indeed—it leads to depression.

You are not suffering from a chemical imbalance in your brain. You are suffering from a social and spiritual imbalance in how we live. Much more than you've been told up to now, it's not serotonin; it's society. It's not your brain; it;s your pain.

This use of solitary confinement is a standard punishment in American prisons. Not long before this, a mentally disabled man in another Arizona prison called Mark Tucker was kept in solitary for so many years, with his pleas for a cellmate refused, that he eventually set himself on fire. In the hospital, with 80 percent of his body burned, he was informed that the Department of Corrections was charging him $1.8 million to pay for the medical care14 to treat his injuries.

like putting a Band-Aid on an amputated limb. [When] you have a person with extreme human distress, [we need to] stop treating the symptoms. The symptoms are a messenger of a deeper problem. Let's get to the deeper problem.

I was beginning to think there was something significant about the fact that grief and depression have identical symptoms. Then one day, after interviewing several depressed people, I asked myself: What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief—for our own lives not being as they should? What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost, yet still need?