Quotes About Mental health

You can't drown yourself that simply. All good suicides involve speed and irreversibility, because the body will always move to protect itself against the sicko mind trying to do it in.

There's a saying that depression is anger turned inward. I think depression is more complex than that, but there is a pearl of wisdom there for estranged parents.

It was my mom's doing. He would not have thought enough of himself to want anyone to have his name. Except when he was manic, when he probably would have happily named me Conrad Conrad Conrad.

The rest of us would have liked some time off. They only gave us that Friday afternoon, which we took gladly, but we, too, suffered from stress and all sorts of disorders and would have liked more than an afternoon.

ONE OF THE REASONS that depression is so problematic—and deadly, leading to many of the forty thousand suicides in the United States each year—is that people are often loath to admit they are suffering, let alone explore it in detail.

one cognitive symptom of depression may be the loss of optimistic, self-enhancing biases that normally protect healthy people against assaults to their self-esteem. In many instances, depressives may simply be judging themselves and the world much more accurately than non-depressed people, and finding it not a pretty place.

Note the word "insight." In many cases, insight is precisely what depressed people lack: they fail to see the clearly good things about their lives. But the same forces that hold comfort at bay can lead, in the right circumstances, to valuable perspectives on the world.

Many chronic depressives find simple small talk to be a Herculean challenge.

As the psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison writes, "There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that, compared to 'normal' individuals, artists, writers, and creative people in general are both psychologically 'sicker'—that is, they score higher on a wide variety of measures of psychopathology—and psychologically healthier (for example, they show quite elevated scores on measures of self-confidence and ego strength)

Another well-known study, led by Nancy Andreasen, used structured interviews and matched control groups to examine thirty writers at the prestigious University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Eighty percent of the writers met formal criteria for a major mood disorder, compared with thirty percent of controls matched for age, education, and sex.

The Perspectives of Psychiatry, Paul R. McHugh and Phillip R. Slavney identify four approaches to a suffering person.

A person who has one parent or sibling with major depression is one and a half to three times more likely than the general population to experience it.

William Styron says his depression was like a storm in his brain, punctuated by a thunder of self-critical, fearful, despairing thoughts—one clap following another in an endless night. Oppressed by these thoughts, people often become hopeless. Hopelessness, in an extreme form, leads people to think that only one thing can break the cycle, and that is suicide.

People expected too much, pushed themselves too hard, and therefore brought strains upon their minds that they were constitutionally incapable of withstanding.

Most suicidal people don't have a sense of what will come next. In particular, writes Edwin Shneidman, "The idea of Hell does not ordinarily enter into suicide . . . The destination (or concern) is not to go anywhere, except away.

The Case against Psychotherapy Registration

I just couldn't go back to Suddenly Susan after David Strickland's suicide. I didn't see how we could make the show light and funny any more.

He didn't know what I meant. Intellectually he did, I think. But not in the way we understand it." "Lucky him." "He just listened. He was sympathetic and nonjudgmental." "That's good." "Is it? If someone you care about tells you they are constantly thinking of ending it all, shouldn't you be unsympathetic and very judgmental?

It's all right, Con, to feel anxious. Allow yourself a couple of bad days, now and then, will you?

Geez, if I could get through to you, kiddo, that depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling. Reduction, see? Of all feeling. People who keep stiff upper lips find that it's damn hard to smile.

As recently as 1975, a basic American psychiatry textbook estimated that the frequency of all forms of incest as one case per million. [James Henderson, "Incest", in A. M. Freedman, H.I. Kaplan and B.J. Sadock, eds., Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, 2nd ed. 1975 p. 1532.]

A skill that sensitive people must learn is how to deal with sensory overload when too much is coming at them too quickly. This can leave them exhausted, anxious, depressed, or sick. Like

For many centuries, suicides were treated like criminals by the society. That is part of the terrible legacy that has come down into society's method of handling suicide recovery. Now we have to fight off the demons that have been hanging around suicide for centuries.

There have been times when I have deliberately tried to take my life... I think I must have been crying for some attention.