Mental Ill Health Quotes & Sayings

So here I am. This is as good as it gets. Take it or leave it. — Chuck Palahniuk

Sorrow is not sickness-unless it becomes a permanent state of mental ill-health. The point is there are indeed stages of grief, as all the therapists tell us, but they do not obey some great unseen timetable. — Bel Mooney

In his Dialogue "Timaeus" Plato had a demiurge to create the globe-shaped world according to musical laws, including the human soul. Fifteen hundred years later, that still found an echo in the Renaissance. And in those days the architects realized that the musical harmonies had spatial expressions
namely, the relationships of the length of strings, and spatial relationships were precisely their only concerns. Because both the world and the body and soul were composed according to musical harmonies by the demiurge architect, both the macrocosm and the microcosm, they must therefore be guided in their own architectural designs by the laws of music. — Harry Mulisch

I have never understood why they tried to start the revolution by taking over the universities. It should have been self-evident that the net result of success would be to close the universities but leave the nation unaffected
at least, for quite a long time. Nor do I find it easy to believe that the rebels, as intelligent as most of them were, seriously expected that they could keep the universities alive as corporate bodies, once they had control of them, if they made the fundamental alterations in organization and role that they proposed to. — Muriel Beadle

Mental illness is among the most stigmatized of categories.' People are ashamed of being mentally ill. They fear disclosing their condition to their friends and confidants-and certainly to their employers. — Elyn R. Saks

I still had an irrational desire to do an interpretive dance about rainbows, but it was a small price to pay for being healed. — Kiersten White

You start into it, inflamed by an idea, full of hope, full indeed of confidence. If you are properly modest, you will never write it at all, so there has to be one delicious moment when you have thought of something, know just how you are going to write it, rush for a pencil, and start buoyed up with exaltation. You then get into difficulties, don't see your way out, and finally manage to accomplish more or less what you first meant to accomplish, though losing confidence all the time. Having finished it, you know it is absolutely rotten. A couple of months later, you wonder if it may not be all right after all. — Agatha Christie

Gun owners and non-gun owners alike agree on expanding background checks, making gun trafficking a serious crime with stiff penalties, making it illegal for all stalkers and all domestic abusers to buy guns, and expanding mental health resources so the mentally ill find it easier to receive treatment than to buy firearms. — Gabrielle Giffords

Nobody can make a putt that breaks to the right. It's unnatural. Unless you're left-handed, of course. Standing over a putt that breaks to the right can actually make you dizzy. I've long thought that right-breaking putts are a major contributor to mental and physical ill health. — Dan Jenkins

But it only takes a doubt. A drop of ink falls into a clear glass of water and clouds the whole thing. So the moment after I realised I wasn't perfectly well was the moment I realised I was still very ill indeed. — Matt Haig

Fifteen years later, in 1601, Thomas Wright's The Passions of the Minde was devoted to showing man how wretched he had become through his inability to control his passions. This study, designed to help man know himself in all his depravity, emphasised sin rather than salvation, claiming that the animal passions prevented reason, rebelled against virtue and, like 'thornie briars sprung from the infected roote of original sinne', caused mental and physical ill health.20 Despite its punitive message, the book went into further editions in 1604, 1620, 1621 and 1628, suggesting that the seventeenth-century reader was a glutton for punishment. — Catharine Arnold

During my mental illness, thank God, my grandma was my human rescuer and angel, she ask me to stop taking the medication, leading to the recovering. — Lailah Gifty Akita

It is very sad that most of us just aren't grateful for what we have. If you're reading this, I think it's safe to assume that you're not homeless. You're not blind. You might be ill, but you're still alive. And yet, we find it hard to be thankful. To see the gift each day brings us. It is from this lack of true gratitude that we become sad. We have told ourselves over and over that we aren't happy. That our lives aren't good. That we're no good. — S.R. Crawford

The medication given during mental-ill health makes you rather weaker in body, in soul and in spirit. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Although both home and mental illness are complex, modern ideas, we have fallen into the habit of using phrases such as "housing the homeless" and "treating the mentally ill" as if we knew what counts as housing a homeless person or what it means to treat mental illness. But we do not. We have deceived ourselves that having a home and being mentally healthy are our natural conditions, and that we become homeless or mentally ill as a result of "losing" our homes or our minds. The opposite is the case. We are born without a home and without reason, and have to exert ourselves and are fortunate if we succeed in building a secure home and a sound mind. — Thomas Szasz

Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The 'mental health plague' in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high. The — Mark Fisher

And for three weeks I was trapped in my own mind again. But this time, I had weapons. One of them, maybe the most important, was this knowledge: I have been ill before, then well again. Wellness is possible. — Matt Haig

An eternity of wishing to speak directly to my Creator - I thought in despair - and this is how He finally contacts me? Through AOL Instant Messenger? — A.M. Jenkins

They cultivated normality till it stood out of them all over in knobs, like the muscles upon professional strong men, and scarcely looked normal at all. And they talked interminably and loudly. From their bouncing mental health ordinary ill-balanced mortals shrank in alarm. — Dorothy L. Sayers

I have experienced deep despair, mental-ill health and attempt of suicide. — Lailah Gifty Akita

There are many kinds of adult adversities that can provoke severe psychological distress, including debt and unemployment, dysfunctional marital relationships and occupational stress. The reality is that the social causes of mental ill-health are all around us. — Richard Bentall

When a man's face contorts in bitterness and hatred, he looks a little insane. When his mood changes from elated to assaultive in the time it takes to turn around, his mental stability seems open to question. When he accuses his partner of plotting to harm him, he seems paranoid. It is no wonder that the partner of an abusive man would come to suspect that he was mentally ill.
Yet the great majority of my clients over the years have been psychologically "normal." Their minds work logically; they understand cause and effect; they don't hallucinate. Their perceptions of most life circumstances are reasonably accurate. They get good reports at work; they do well in school or training programs; and no one other than their partners - and children - thinks that there is anything wrong with them. Their value system is unhealthy, not their psychology. — Lundy Bancroft

The mentally ill frighten and embarrass us. And so we marginalize the people who most need our acceptance. What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candor, more unashamed conversation. — Glenn Close

I get so excited when a song I wrote that's very personal to me goes No. 1 and I look down and see people singing the words back to me. — Taylor Swift

There may not be any romance to mental illness but who needs romance when the preferable route is agency? The prevailing conversation around mental health issues is agency and the lack thereof on the part of the mentally ill. But what do you do if you're a paid-up member of the mentally ill populace in question? Do you curl up into a ball and give up? No, you look for solutions. Ultimately, it's about keeping despair at bay and sometimes simple things like running, taking up a hobby, doing charity work, painting or, in my case, writing can be a galvanizing part of the recovery process. Keeping the brain and the body active can give life a semblance of pleasure and hope. This is what writing has done for me. I took every traumatic element of my condition and channelled it into something useful. — Diriye Osman

My mind told me he most have had a weapon; my eyes saw none. — Abigail Gibbs

No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny. — Hannah Arendt

This and countless later experiences working in and around the world of "shrinks" and the mentally ill has led me to the conclusion that overinterpretation of human psychology can be inadvisable. My favorite Freud joke has him sitting in his gentlemen's club in Vienna after dinner, enjoying a cigar. A hostile colleague wanders up and says, "That's a big, fat, long cigar, Professor Freud," to which Freud replies, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. — Oliver James

The greatest souls have survived deep distress and mental-ill health. — Lailah Gifty Akita

When we step out of our Perfect You, we will be in conflict and this will make us frustrated and unhappy, and even temporarily reduce our intelligence and potentially lead to mental ill health. — Dr. Caroline Leaf

The writer's life is frightful. I have experienced deep dispair, mental ill and attempt of suicide. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Smart isn't enough. The kind of people I want on my research team are those who will help everyone else feel happy to be here. p118 — Randy Pausch

Prisons are woefully ill-equipped for their current role as the nations primary mental health facilities. — Jamie Fellner

I played a killer twice. Once on 'Matlock,' on Andy Griffith's show, I got to play the killer. — Dick Van Dyke

We had a teacher called Fanny Menlove, and I remember once when she was out of the room Nancy went up to the blackboard and wrote it backward - Menlove Fanny - and we all fell around laughing. She got into big trouble, but she didn't seem to mind. She had no fear. — Peter FitzSimons

People who relax by watching TV instead of going out to engage with the world tend to be far less energetic. the benefits of exercise in protecting against depression and mental ill-health are huge. Those around you can also affect your energy levels. Self-talk also works wonders on energy levels. — Liz Miller

Perhaps partly because of the troubling business of being struggled over, I have come to value highly the privilege of getting away, of being alone. It has seemed to me that my most fruitful periods of work are the times when I have been able to get completely away from what others think, from professional expectations and daily demands, and gain perspective on what I am doing. — Carl R. Rogers

a manual for how to build a mentally ill child — David Foster Wallace

Experience does not give you wisdom, it gives you habits. — Michael Grinder

The TV licence people just can't believe we don't have a television. I'm a bolshie git. I shout at them things like, 'I don't need TV, I'm an intellectual.' — Julian Cope