Quotes About Mental health

They were living out lives we might have been living, if we hadn't been occupied with being mental patients.

Why I am opposed to antidepressants. Because I think depression has something to tell me. Because often depression is an appropriate reaction. Because I am terrified of changing the functioning of my brain in any way. Because I believe depression is me, and that without it I would not be me. Because I can't imagine my life without the time off I get from periodic depression. These are the typical idiotic reasons people give for not wanting to feel better. So in this respect, I am quite normal.

Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever

I mentally bless and exonerate anyone who has kicked a chair out from beneath her or swallowed opium in large chunks. My mind has met their environment, here in the void. I understand perfectly.

Flannery craved a cigarette. Her nerves were so tense that only nicotine could soothe them, and for the first time, she genuinely understood how the drug worked. It wasn't just a prop or an affectation. It was a tool for mental health.

But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defensless that I couldn't do it. It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn't in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get.

I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn't say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.

I knew you'd decide to be all right again.

I smile, now, thinking: we all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists

it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.

There is a certain clinical satisfaction in seeing just how bad things can get.

I knew I should be grateful to Mrs Guinea, only I couldn't feel a thing. If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.

I sank back in the gray, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn't stir.

Virginia Woolf helps. Her novels make mine possible.

To the person in The Bell Jar, black and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream

We all like to think that we are important enough to need psychiatrists.

A psychiatrist is the God of our age. But they cost money.

But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

I may have made a straight A in physics, but I was panic-struck. Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it.

After all, I wasn't crippled in any way, I just studied too hard, I didn't know when to stop.

O my Homunculus, I am ill. I have taken a pill to kill The thin Papery feeling. From the poem Cut, 24 October 1962

We'll take up where we left off, Esther', she had said, with her sweet martyr's smile. 'We'll act as if all this were a bad dream.' A bad dream. To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream. A bad dream. I remembered everything.