Quotes About Mental health

One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, It's not like you don't have a choice, because you do-- you can either type or kill yourself.

Mattie sat at the table, obsessing, orbiting around herself. She was sick of her worried, hostile mind. It would have killed her long before, she felt, if it hadn't needed the transportation.

I naively believe that self-love is 80 percent of the solution, that it helps beyond words to take yourself through the day as you would with your most beloved mental-patient relative, with great humor and lots of small treats.

What helps is that we are not all crazy and hopeless on the same day.

hate to be wrong, and I hate that I am wrong so often in so many ways, that my thinking is often defensive, judgmental, and skittish. (I have a thinking disorder. I once took a 20 Questions quiz about drinking but substituted thinking and I got most of them: Do you prefer to think alone? Do you hide your thinking from loved ones? Has thinking begun to impact your health and quality of life?) Anyway

She slept deeply, but as usual, she did not dream. It had been months; none of them was dreaming anymore. [p. 227]

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.

Yes. To write a novel is to risk my sanity. The deeper I get into the suffering and conflict of the characters, into the very situations and thoughts and feelings that make the novel worthwhile, the worse I feel, and the more likely I am to be severely depressed when the book is finished. There is no avoiding this: it is the result of attempting to tell all you know, to reach for the stars, to write what matters.

I told myself anything I needed to keep my sanity.

went on, sweet, and demure, and winding to a compassionate finale. I know your pain. I know. But madness isn't for you. It never was. You're the one who never goes mad.

A bit of the vagueness of music stops you going completely mad, I imagine.

Why take drugs specifically designed to send you insane?

Psychosis, ladies and gentlemen, is the price we pay for being what we are. And how unfair, how bitterly unfair it is that the price is not shared around but paid by one man in a hundred for the other ninety-nine.

As affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down.

When people are actively engaged in a cause their lives have more purpose… with a resulting improvement in mental health

As affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down. Rather than buffering people from clinical depression, increased wealth in a society seems to foster it. Suicide

The much-discussed estimate of twenty-two vets a day committing suicide in the United States is deceptive: it was only in 2008 that - for the first time in decades- the suicide rate among veterans surpassed the civilian rate in America, and though each death is enormously tragic, the majority of those veterans were over the age of fifty. Many were Vietnam vets and, generally speaking, the more time that passes after a trauma, the less likely a suicide is to have anything to do with it.

Northern European societies are among the few where people sleep alone or with a partner in a private room, and that may have significant implications for mental health in general and for PTSD in particular. Virtually all mammals seem to benefit from companionship; even lab rats recover more quickly from trauma if they are caged with other rats rather than alone. In humans, lack of social support has been found to be twice as reliable at predicting PTSD as the severity of the trauma itself.

If contemporary America doesn't develop ways to publicly confront the emotional consequences of war, those consequences will continue to burn a hole through the vets themselves. I

PTSD is a disorder of recovery, and if treatment only focuses on identifying symptoms, it pathologizes and alienates vets. But if the focus is on family and community, it puts them in a situation of collective healing.

When people are actively engaged in a cause their lives have more purpose… with a resulting improvement in mental health," Lyons wrote in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research in 1979. "It would be irresponsible to suggest violence as a means of improving mental health, but the Belfast findings suggest that people will feel better psychologically if they have more involvement with their community.

The positive effects of war on mental health were first noticed by the great sociologist Emile Durkheim, who found that when European countries went to war, suicide rates dropped.

As affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down. Rather than buffering people from clinical depression, increased wealth in a society seems to foster

Bluntly put, modern society seems to emphasize extrinsic values over intrinsic ones, and as a result, mental health issues refuse to decline with growing wealth. The more assimilated a person is into American society, the more likely they are to develop depression during the course of their lifetime, regardless of what ethnicity they are.