Quotes & Sayings About Mental Illness Bipolar

I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been midly manic. When I am my present "normal" self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In sort, for myself, I am a hard act to follow. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Anxious, depressed, psychotic, lunatic, bipolar, manic - you name it, I attract it. Perhaps you've heard of me? In some circles I am known as the Pied Piper of Mental Illness. — J.L. Black

That was the crux. You. Only you could work on you. Nobody could force you, and if you weren't ready, then you weren't ready, and no amount of open-armed encouragement was going to change that. — Norah Vincent

Genius by birth, Bipolar by design — Stanley Victor Paskavich

When it comes to mental illness most of the diagnoses are similar or the same yet they can never display how we individually go through our pain. — Stanley Victor Paskavich

The idea to go West just fell into my lap from the sky. Go west, young man. That's how the best ideas happen. Just out of nowhere. When you're not even thinking. Like they've been created for you and you just have to reach out and grab them before someone else does. — Shannon Mullen

You'll never see my books on Vanity Fair I'm not the type of author they would want there — Stanley Victor Paskavich

There is a dead space between most people and those afflicted with Mental Illness and it's called Understanding — Stanley Victor Paskavich

Just to let you know I don't post my books and things on the net in hopes of being rich. The reason is. "I am a person with Bipolar Disorder" and they're are a lot of great minds on the "Famous Bipolar" list that died penniless. If I do the same it's no big deal but having a form of mental Illness I would love to get my name on the Bipolar list also one day. Preferably while I'm still living so I can make sure they spelled it right — Stanley Victor Paskavich

In our family "whim-wham" is code, a defanged reference to any number of moods and psychological disorders, be they depressive, manic, or schizoaffective. Back in the 1970s and '80s - when they were all straight depression - we called them "dark nights of the soul." St. John of the Cross's phrase ennobled our sickness, spiritualized it. We cut God out of it after the manic breaks started in 1986, the year my dad, brother, and I were all committed. Call it manic depression or by its new, polite name, bipolr disorder. Whichever you wish. We stick to our folklore and call it the whim-whams. — David Lovelace

I was hoping that I could say stuff about mental illness that maybe people didn't know. You know, speak up for bipolar disorder and let people know a little bit more about it that they may not have known. — Eric Millegan

When my mind plays tricks on me I can deal. But when my mind plays tricks on my mind I can not tell what's real — Stanley Victor Paskavich

People with mental illnesses aren't wrapped up in themselves because they are intrinsically any more selfish than other people. Of course not. They are just feeling things that can't be ignored. Things that point the arrows inward. — Matt Haig

If every Genius has a touch of Madness, does every Normal person have a touch of Ignorance ? — Stanley Victor Paskavich

To become a fad, a psychiatric diagnosis requires 3 preconditions: a pressing need, an engaging story, and influential prophets. The pressing need arises from the fact that disturbed and disturbing kids are very often encountered in clinical, school, and correctional settings. They suffered and cause suffering to those around them - making themselves noticeable to families, doctors, and teachers. Everyone feels enormous pressure to do something. Previous diagnoses (especially conduct or oppositional disorder) provided little hope and no call to action. In contrast, a diagnosis or childhood Bipolar Disorder creates a justification for medication and for expanded school services. The medications have broad and nonspecific effects that are often helpful in reducing anger, even if the diagnosis is inaccurate. — Allen Frances

Oh! This'll impress you - I'm actually in the Abnormal Psychology textbook. Obviously my family is so proud. Keep in mind though, I'm a PEZ dispenser and I'm in the abnormal Psychology textbook. Who says you can't have it all? — Carrie Fisher

Want to do something noble and courageous while you're on this Earth treat the mentally ill like they have some worth. — Stanley Victor Paskavich

Sensitive people usually love deeply and hate deeply. They don't know any other way to live than by extremes because thier emotional theromastat is broken. — Shannon L. Alder

I'm Bipolar but as normal as you except for the times my mind thinks like two — Stanley Victor Paskavich

I think one thing is that anybody who's had to contend with mental illness - whether it's depression, bipolar illness or severe anxiety, whatever - actually has a fair amount of resilience in the sense that they've had to deal with suffering already, personal suffering. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Many people say that psychiatrists just want to push drugs. Well I seriously have to say, without medication, I'd be locked up in a VA hospital somewhere. — Stanley Victor Paskavich

Bipolar is an illness not a hopeless destination it can be maintained with proper medication — Stanley Victor Paskavich

In the terms of 'Mental Illness' Isn't stable a place they put horses that wish to run free? — Stanley Victor Paskavich

I don't find anything upsetting or gross or degrading about fighting with a mental illness: Bipolar or Schizophrenia. — Kangana Ranaut

If you can still wipe your own backside then life's not that bad! — E.J. Plows

It is in my head! That's why it's called Mental Illness. — Roni Askey-Doran

I've accepted the fact I have mental illness but when my imaginary friends start calling me crazy that's where I draw the line — Stanley Victor Paskavich

Our family suffers from a hereditary condition called, generally, mental illness. Specifically, multiple family members in successive generations have suffered from either bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. — Victor LaValle

They're the perfect loving fam'ly, so adoring ...
And I love them ev'ry day of ev'ry week.
So my son's a little shit, my husband's boring,
And my daughter, though a genius, is a freak. — Brian Yorkey

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

I know the empathy borne of despair; I know the fluidity of thought, the expansive, even beautiful, mind that hypomania brings, and I know this is quicksilver and precious and often it's poison. There has always existed a sort of psychic butcher who works the scales of transcendence, who weighs out the bloody cost of true art. — David Lovelace

The west coast is a mecca for wild hearts, wild minds, wild spirits and I'm a WMD - I've got so much energy I'm about to explode. — Shannon Mullen

Every one wants to be a Genius. But only the brave choose to go mad to get there ... — Stanley Victor Paskavich

One of the things that baffles me (and there are quite a few) is how there can be so much lingering stigma with regards to mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder. In my opinion, living with manic depression takes a tremendous amount of balls. Not unlike a tour of Afghanistan (though the bombs and bullets, in this case, come from the inside). At times, being bipolar can be an all-consuming challenge, requiring a lot of stamina and even more courage, so if you're living with this illness and functioning at all, it's something to be proud of, not ashamed of.
They should issue medals along with the steady stream of medication. — Carrie Fisher

Psychosis can happen out of the blue, to anyone, and no one knows why. Not even the best doctors on the planet.
And that's why Mom is always so afraid. If we don't know what made me sick in the first place, how can anyone guarantee I won't flip out again? — Jeannine Garsee

Why do they always prescribe thyroid medicine to go with the mental illness cocktails they whip up? — Stanley Victor Paskavich

When you have mental illness it's common to be shunned by your family or friends it wouldn't happen if they knew the pain you were in. — Stanley Victor Paskavich

Bipolar illness, manic depression, manic-depressive illness, manic-depressive psychosis. That's a nice way of saying you will feel so high that no street drug can compete and you will feel so low that you wish you had been hit by a Mack truck instead. — Christine F. Anderson

When you read my poems or quotes remember you're stepping into the mind that steps outside of me — Stanley Victor Paskavich

The moment he leaves, the bees are back. Buzzing. I breathe in and feel their tiny feet in my bronchi. Buzz. Wings beeting in my alveoli. Flutterbuzz.
[ ... ]
Flutterflutterzzzzzzzzbuzzzzzz. I have to do something to make it stop. I have to feel something simple. This
flutterflutterflutterbuzzzzz
is too complicated. Too confusing. I want to feel something about which there can be no argument or debate. Soemthing about which everything will be known. Here. Now. Something that will make all the rest stop.
There is an exquisite and audible pop when the hooked tip of the center tine in the fish fork punctures the fat purple vein. — Juliann Garey

I now know for certain that my mind and emotions, my fix on the real and my family's well-being, depend on just a few grams of salt. But treatment's the easy part. Without honesty, without a true family reckoning, that salt's next to worthless. — David Lovelace

I found my way home, stripped naked, and lay on the bathroom floor, the cool tiles pushing up. Keeping me from falling. I didn't know how long the floor would hold me. I prayed Ellen would come home ... — Juliann Garey

Mental illness is not in the business of making sense of itself. — Roni Askey-Doran

Her parents, she said, has put a pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The red balls told her when she should laugh, the blue ones when she should be silent and keep away from other people; the green balls told her that she should start multiplying by three. Every few days a silver ball would make its way through the pins of the machine. At this point her head turned and she stared at me; I assumed she was checking to see if I was still listening. I was, of course. How could one not? The whole thing was bizarre but riveting. I asked her, What does the silver ball mean? She looked at me intently, and then everything went dead in her eyes. She stared off into space, caught up in some internal world. I never found out what the silver ball meant. — Kay Redfield Jamison

My mind feels like a race car on the track, getting faster and faster every time I pause to think or blink or try to focus on anything. Nothing can keep up to it, not the other cars, not my body, not anyone else in the bar. It's a rush, pure exhilaration, and I'm having the time of my life. But instead of driving, I'm in the passenger seat, along for the ride, watching myself race around the track from my barstool. — Shannon Mullen

My life isn't good or bad. It's an incredible series of emotional and mental extremes, with beautiful thunderstorms and stunning sunrises.
Some would say this is my artistic temperament. Others would say i am mentally ill or bipolar. I SAY ... it's a bit of both and i make the most of them, CREATIVELY. — Jaeda DeWalt

For all the normal people who make fun of the mentally ill it's spelled K.A.R.M.A. and it's pronounced your days coming, Bitch! — Stanley Victor Paskavich

Sometimes I feel the only way I can get a major publisher interested in mental illness is if I find a character who has bipolar disorder and is also a love-sick vampire attending an English school called Hogwarts. But I'm not giving up. — Pete Earley

When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you. — Marya Hornbacher

Yes I'm Bipolar but I'm as normal as you except the times when my mind thinks like two — Stanley Victor Paskavich

I AM come of a race noted for vigor of fancy and ardor of passion. Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence
whether much that is glorious
whether all that is profound
does not spring from disease of thought
from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in waking, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of evil. They penetrate, however, rudderless or compassless into the vast ocean of the "light ineffable", and again, like the adventures of the Nubian geographer, "agressi sunt mare tenebrarum, quid in eo esset exploraturi".
We will say then, that I am mad. — Edgar Allan Poe

I won't say that writing tamed the Black Beast. It soothed him, though, enough so he agreed simply to occupy a corner of my mind ... Gradually, I redirected my focus and skills towards causes much closer to my own heart: writing and mental health advocacy.
[ ... ]
I felt so good at times that I even wondered, was I still bipolar? In my community work, I saw so many people who were much worse off than I was - deep in their disease in a way I no longer seemed to be. I knew that this often happens to manic-depressives: the brain forgets the ravages of the illness they way a woman forgets the pains of childbirth. You have to, to survive. But it's always a dangerous place to be, because you inevitably start to question the need for medication, therapy, and all the other rigorous stopgaps of sanity so carefully put into place to prevent another episode. — Terri Cheney

Like Sylvia Plath, Natalie Jeanne Champagne invites you so close to the pain and agony of her life of mental illness and addiction, which leaves you gasping from shock and laughing moments later: this is both the beauty and unique nature of her storytelling. With brilliance and courage, the author's brave and candid chronicle travels where no other memoir about mental illness and addiction has gone before. The Third Sunrise is an incredible triumph and Natalie Jeanne Champagne is without a doubt the most important new voice in this genre. — Andy Behrman

My psychiatrist said I had charisma so at least I'm certified — Stanley Victor Paskavich

Except you cannot outrun insanity, anymore than you can outrun your own shadow. — Alyssa Reyans

If you're selfish enough to kill yourself write your suicide note on the back of your will — Stanley Victor Paskavich

Seeing movies about mental illness, a lot of falseness has leapt out at me over the years. So I just focused on what I remembered, the real experience of seeing somebody like that. And as an adult, I've had family members who are bipolar, so I've seen it again. — Maya Forbes

Suddenly, I'm lighter, only half of who I was. — Shannon Mullen

The doctor's words made me understand what happened to me was a dark, evil, and shameful secret, and by association I too was dark, evil, and shameful. While it may not have been their intention, this was the message my clouded mind received. To escape the confines of the hospital, I once again disassociated myself from my emotions and numbed myself to the pain ravaging my body and mind. I acted as if nothing was wrong and went back to performing the necessary motions to get me from one day to the next. I existed but I did not live. — Alyssa Reyans

I've invaded the walls of the asylums with my ink pen. The way they look at mental illness won't be the same again — Stanley Victor Paskavich

When you are cursed with a bipolar mind racing thoughts are the ones that you find — Stanley Victor Paskavich

But money spent while manic doesn't fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you're given excellent reason to be even more so. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I used to think it utterly normal that I suffered from "suicidal ideation" on an almost daily basis. In other words, for as long as I can remember, the thought of ending my life came to me frequently and obsessively. — Stephen Fry

But new love only lasts so long, and then you crash back into the real people you are, and from as high as we were, it's a very long fall, and we hit the ground with a thud. — Marya Hornbacher

I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible ... — Elizabeth Wurtzel

I think people don't understand how intimately tied suicide is to mental illness, particularly to depressive illness and bipolar illness. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Because of my bipolar condition I will have to take anti psychotics until I die but hopefully a handful of them won't be the last thing I taste — Stanley Victor Paskavich

What is actually observed in so-called 'biplar children'? If you read the research reports carefully, they describe broad and persistent emotional dysregulation. Although these children have mood swings, they do not develop manic or hypomanic episodes. They are moody, irritable, oppositional and likely to misbehave - like all children with disruptive behavior disorders. Their grandiose thinking usually consists of little beyond boastfulness. No evidence from genetics, neurobiology, follow-up studies or treatment response shows that this syndrome has anything in common with classical bipolarity. — Joel Paris

Because I'm not, in fact, depressed, Prozac makes me manic and numb - one of the reasons I slice my arm in the first place is that I'm coked to the gills on something utterly wrong for what I have. — Marya Hornbacher

I admit I have Mental Illness so please no more 'Fruit Cakes' for Christmas Please — Stanley Victor Paskavich

Bipolar robs you of that which is you. It can take from you the very core of your being and replace it with something that is completely opposite of who and what you truly are. Because my bipolar went untreated for so long, I spent many years looking in the mirror and seeing a person I did not recognize or understand. Not only did bipolar rob me of my sanity, but it robbed me of my ability to see beyond the space it dictated me to look. I no longer could tell reality from fantasy, and I walked in a world no longer my own. — Alyssa Reyans

I get absolutely shitfaced. I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old. I am having the time of my life. — Marya Hornbacher

Been under treatment for PTSD and bipolar since 1992. I'm not ashamed of my illness. I've been shunned by many and I feel for those shunned, too. — Stanley Victor Paskavich

Other pressing problems with the current medical model [of mental disorder] is that it encourages false epidemics, most glaringly in bipolar disorder and ADHD, and the wholesale exportation of Western mental disorders and Western accounts of mental disorder. Taken together, this is leading to a pandemic of Western disease categories and treatments, while undermining the variety and richness of the human experience. — Neel Burton

Most people can only sleep with a nice soft pillow I can only sleep with heavy anti psychotics — Stanley Victor Paskavich

That's what mountains do, they taunt you, lure you to the freedom of the wilderness, and it is fucking exhilarating. — Shannon Mullen

Falling in love happens so suddenly that it seems, all at once, that you have always been in love. — Marya Hornbacher