Mental Illness Quotes

I'm so good at beginnings, but in the end I always seem to destroy everything, including myself.

An inner ease spreads inside me. Such is the power of acceptance and understanding from other people, the power of validation

I need them to be aware and present with me in the midst of the storm, not just tell me what to do.

You can live to be old or young, but you'll always have moments when you lose your head.

Thirty seconds of pure awareness is a long time, especially after a lifetime of escaping yourself at all costs.

Being loud after drinking wine doesn't help. Being silent after drinking wine doesn't help. Nothing really ever gets solved either way.

Panic attacks are a lot like being drunk in some ways, you lose self-control. You cry for seemingly no reason. You deal with the hangover long into the next day.

Depression is real. It happens. We go through it. Hold onto yourself in those moments.

If you do finish the book and are still scared of me and people of my ilk, then I recommend you schedule an appointment with a therapist. Either that, or try writing your own book

View other authors as your allies rather than your competition

No healthy mind could bring itself to torture another human being.

I am here for readers to see parts of themselves during my dark days, but also for a better way of living in my triumphs and gained wisdom.

I graciously survived depression, mental-illness and attempt of suicide.

Believing something existed and then finding out it didn't was like reaching the top of the stairs and thinking there was one more step.

Crazy. It was the same word María and Tía Rosa flung at Grandpa Lázaro. The same word anyone said when they didn't understand something. "Crazy" was a way to shut people up, disregard them entirely.

Inside my head is a jigsaw made of trillions and trillions and trillions of atoms. It might take a while.

Killing yourself slowly is still killing yourself. Wanting to die is not the same as wanting to come home. Recovery is hard work. Not wanting to die is hard work.

Everyone wanted me to feed them that story—darkness to light, weakness to strength, broken to whole. I wanted it, too.

...all I could think about was how both sets of parents had needed to make their decision, on whether to medicate their child, in a scientific vacuum. (p. 35)

What other than mental illness spurs normal people to write prolifically? The chief cause is not quite illness, but nearly: love, especially unhappy love.

Cry wolf often enough and you eventually get eaten by the wolf, even if the wolf is you.

The only problem was, when your whole existence is something you have to cope with, you look back one day and find that your strategy has become a way of life.

You see demons in the eyes of the world, and the world sees bottomless pit in yours.

I knew you were in charge of me but my mind broke on its own.

Narcissists often feign oppression because narcissists always feel entitled.

Suddenly, I’m lighter, only half of who I was.

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.

The forest is blanketed by the greenest ferns and moss and bonsai-like trees, a wild majesty that beckons hobbits and pixies and elves and dreamers.

her eyes are unfathomable to me, hostile, even, as if she had removed herself to a place where I cannot reach her - somewhere I cannot know.

Understand ... I don't hate her, I hate what she's become. I hate her illness.

She had spells of manic loquaciousness, followed by days of silence.

Sometimes it's as if I can shrink away to nothing. Sometimes I feel as pure and perfect as a ghost. The hunger, the headaches, the dizziness—these are the only things that are real.

But I know that if I don't at least try, I'll stay the way I am till it kills me. Till I kill me, I mean. I never really accept that that's what I'm doing - I say it, but I don't believe it.

He tried to sleep, but his head was filled with the faces of lunatics, their palsied hands, their shattered eyes.

As smart as I am, it took a boy stuck in his house to teach me that sometimes it doesn't matter where you are at all. It only matters whos with you.

We are all a collection of lost causes, stashed here so no one has to see just how wounded we are.

Treatment for people with disabilities and mental illness in prewar America reveals a profoundly ignorant medical establishment and educational community.

Fools write books about madness being an elevated mental state or an alternative form of creativity. It's not, it's anguish.

It is a terrible thing to grieve for someone who is not dead, not in love with someone else, but just no longer there.

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

I honestly didn’t realize at the time that I was dealing with myself. But I suppose it’s true that I developed a therapy that provides the things I needed for so many years and never got.

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

What aided the mind made the body suffer. They could choose mental health or physical health, but they could not have both.

There are such things as delusions, but not every unlikely vision that the mentally ill have is imaginary.

While you were busy trying to prove God stands behind you, God was before me lighting the trail, so he could lead us both.

Cause I'd rather stay hereWith all the madmenThan perish with the sadmen roaming freeAnd I'd rather play hereWith all the madmenFor I'm quite content they're all as saneAs me

I rehearsed Foucault's argument that the presence of madness on our doorstep is good for us, for it reminds us the life we live is only one among several human possibilities.

A child's death isn't always necessary for a mother to grieve.

Plato believed that insanity was essential to our nature and assumed that it held esoteric knowledge about who we are.

A nightmare has taken hold of my body. Lunacy has dug its way inside my mind.