Quotes About Mental health

And now we get realized to us once more another thing which we often forget—or try to: that no man has a wholly undiseased mind; that in one way or another all men are mad.

I was back to being polite, the well-tempered paranoid. I didn't have much of a choice. If I wasn't polite, they could stick me with those needles or put me back in that little room or take away my visitor privileges or any number of other things. Besides, there didn't seem to be any urgency or anything to be gained by not being polite, the way there had been before. So I was polite. There was time.

There are no people anywhere who don't have some mental illness. It all depends on where you set the bar and how hard you look.

None of us are entirely well, and none of us are irrecoverably sick. At my best I have islands of being sick. At my worst I had islands of being well. Except for a reluctance to give up on myself there isn't anything I can claim credit for that helped me recover from my breaks. Even that doesn't count. You either have or don't have a reluctance to give up on yourself. It helps a lot if others don't give up on you. Had

The Doc. Virginia and Simon had told me that Dr. Dale was my doctor. I have a fuzzy recollection of walking up to some doctor-looking person and being totally absorbed by his gold tie clip. I suspected it was the button to end the world so I didn't touch it. I'm pretty sure it was Dr. Dale. I don't know who else would be so tasteless as to walk around a mental hospital wearing the button to end the world.

At the time I would have endorsed the radical notions of R. D. Laing that insanity was a sane reaction to an insane society. Leaving the insane society to set up an independent self-sufficient commune seemed like a very sensible noble brave thing to do—plus it figured to be good for my mental health. Had I gone crazy in Boston or New York I would have blamed my culture and society without a second thought. The arguments were all packed, polished, and ready to fly.

Looking at mental health problems the same way we look at other medical problems is factually correct—the best bet for reducing the disabling symptoms and the only way to lessen the stigma and blame that traditionally double or triple the pain.

chapter 2 Raised by Wolves The biggest gift of being unambiguously mentally ill is the time I've saved myself trying to be normal.

Until we come up with an unequivocal blood test or the equivalent, we're all blowing smoke and don't know if what we call schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are one disorder or a dozen.

I was back to being polite, the well-tempered paranoid. I didn't have much choice. If I wasn't polite, they could stick me with those needles or put me back in that little room or take away my visitor privileges or any number of other things. Besides, there didn't seem any urgency or anything to be gained by not being polite, the way there had been before. So I was polite. There was time.

There are no people anywhere who don't have some mental illness. It all depends on where you set the bar and how hard you look. What is a myth is that we are mostly mentally well most of the time.

The cost of not caring for the mentally ill dwarfs the cost of caring.

Imagine what effect it would have on you if someone stood behind you all day telling you how useless you were when you were trying desperately to cope with a difficult experience. Now imagine how much worse it would be if the criticism and harsh judgment came from inside your own mind.

when you start to feel a little sad, anxious, or irritable it's not the mood that does the damage but how you react to it. • the effort of trying to free yourself from a bad mood or bout of unhappiness – of working out why you're unhappy and what you can do about it – often makes things worse. It's like being trapped in quicksand – the more you struggle to be free, the deeper you sink.

You can't stop the triggering of unhappy memories, self-critical thoughts and judgmental ways of thinking – but you can stop what happens next. You can stop the spiral from feeding off itself and triggering the next cycle of negative thoughts. You can stop the cascade of destructive emotions that can end up making you unhappy, anxious, stressed, irritable or exhausted.

We only compound our feelings of depletion if we deal with them by giving up activities that normally nourish us

For some, especially young people, irritability is a more prominent experience than sadness in depression.

I know what it means to go mad. I'll die before I go there. But first I have to find out if that's where I'm really heading.

He killed himself for wanting to live.

She could have shot herself, scratched herself, or indulged in other forms of self-mutilation, but she chose what she probably felt was the weakest option—to at least endure the discomfort of the weather.

As I've been alluding to, my one saving grace is distraction. It keeps me sane. It helps me cope,...

And I stop listening to me, because to put it bluntly, I tire me. When I start thinking like that, I become so exhausted, and I don't have the luxury of indulging fatigue.

No," I tell him, "I won't. I won't be okay just for the sake of it. Not anymore.

Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy. [p. 32]