Quotes & Sayings About Struggling With Mental Illness

All of us must do our best to live gracefully in the present moment. I now see depression as akin to being tied to a chair with restraints on my wrists. It took me a long time to realize that I only magnify my distress by struggling for freedom. My pain diminished when I gave up trying to escape completely from it. However, don't interpret my current approach to depression as utterly fatalistic. I do whatever I can to dull depression's pain, while premising my life on its continuing presence. The theologian and philosopher Thomas Moore puts it well with his distinction between cure and care. While cure implies the eradication of trouble, care "appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life. — David A. Karp

As an undergraduate student in psychology, I was taught that multiple personalities were a very rare and bizarre disorder. That is all that I was taught on ... It soon became apparent that what I had been taught was simply not true. Not only was I meeting people with multiplicity; these individuals entering my life were normal human beings with much to offer. They were simply people who had endured more than their share of pain in this life and were struggling to make sense of it. — Deborah Bray Haddock

Whether it's someone struggling with mental illness, someone struggling with poverty or struggling with their own limitations in their social behaviors, for some reason, I'm drawn to characters like that. — Gbenga Akinnagbe

My lowest self says: "That person is acting like a total jerk!"
My slightly higher self says: "That person is acting like a total jerk right now only because he's going through a really hard time in life, and his parents never taught him how to behave better, and he might have some sort of mild mental illness, and also he has a drinking problem ... so I should try to be more compassionate and generous toward sad, tragic, miserable people like that."
My even higher self says: "We are all just flawed and frightened human beings in an uncertain world, struggling to survive."
Then finally my VERY highest self says: "Lord, please help me stop acting like a total jerk."
... and that's when it finally stops being about the other person at all. — Elizabeth Gilbert

For the first time I realized that my life was just full of brokenness. I worked in a broken system of justice. My clients were broken by mental illness, poverty, and racism. They were torn apart by disease, drugs and alcohol, pride, fear, and anger. I thought of Joe Sullivan and of Trina, Antonio, Ian, and dozens of other broken children we worked with, struggling to survive in prison. I thought of people broken by war, like Herbert Richardson; people broken by poverty, like Marsha Colbey; people broken by disability, like Avery Jenkins. In their broken state, they were judged and condemned by people whose commitment to fairness had been broken by cynicism, hopelessness, and prejudice. — Bryan Stevenson