30 Quotes On Mental Illness

In a world where mental health awareness is gaining momentum, reflecting on powerful insights can offer solace and understanding. Quotes on mental illness provide a unique lens through which we can better comprehend the struggles and triumphs of those who navigate this challenging journey. This collection of curated quotes captures the essence of resilience, empathy, and hope, serving as a reminder that mental health is an integral part of our overall well-being. Whether you seek motivation, reinforcement, or a deeper connection to others' experiences, these words hold the power to inspire change and foster a greater sense of community. Dive in and explore the profound wisdom shared by individuals from various walks of life.

1. “Our society tends to regard as a sickness any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system and this is plausible because when an individual doesn't fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a cure for a sickness and therefore as good.” - Theodore Kaczynski

2. “Well,' said Can o' Beans, a bit hesitantly,' imprecise speech is one of the major causes of mental illness in human beings.'Huh?'Quite so. The inability to correctly perceive reality is often responsible for humans' insane behavior. And every time they substitute an all-purpose, sloppy slang word for the words that would accurately describe an emotion or a situation, it lowers their reality orientations, pushes them farther from shore, out onto the foggy waters of alienation and confusion.'The manner in which the other were regarding him/her made Can O' Beans feel compelled to continue. 'The word neat, for example, has precise connotations. Neat means tidy, orderly, well-groomed. It's a valuable tool for describing the appearance of a room, a hairdo, or a manuscript. When it's generically and inappropriately applied, though, as it is in the slang aspect, it only obscures the true nature of the thing or feeling that it's supposed to be representing. It's turned into a sponge word. You can wring meanings out of it by the bucketful--and never know which one is right. When a person says a movie is 'neat,' does he mean that it's funny or tragic or thrilling or romantic, does he mean that the cinematography is beautiful, the acting heartfelt, the script intelligent, the direction deft, or the leading lady has cleavage to die for? Slang possesses an economy, an immediacy that's attractive, all right, but it devalues experience by standardizing and fuzzing it. It hangs between humanity and the real world like a . . . a veil. Slang just makes people more stupid, that's all, and stupidity eventually makes them crazy. I'd hate to ever see that kind of craziness rub off onto objects.” - Tom Robbins

3. “They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.” - Nathaniel Lee

4. “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

5. “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

6. “I'm so good at beginnings, but in the end I always seem to destroy everything, including myself.” - Kiera Van Gelder

7. “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

8. “...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)” - Robert Whitaker

9. “Calling it lunacy makes it easier to explain away the things we don't understand.” - Megan Chance

10. “But Hey, Guess What Crazy means I'm not liablefor my actions. So screw it, I'll go home, propped up on Prozac against distractions” - Ellen Hopkins

11. “Between 10 and 20 percent of people with anorexia die from heart attacks, other complications and suicide; the disease has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. Or Kitty could have lost her life in a different way, lost it to the roller coaster of relapse and recovery, inpatient and outpatient, that eats up, on average, five to seven years. Or a lifetime: only half of all anorexics recovery in the end. The other half endure lives of dysfunction and despair. Friends and families give up on them. Doctors dread treating them. They’re left to stand in the bakery with the voice ringing in their ears, alone in every way that matters.” - Harriet Brown

12. “Except you cannot outrun insanity, anymore than you can outrun your own shadow.” - Alyssa Reyans

13. “After my first few tastes I was pretty much hooked. I'd have dry spells, months without any or only piddling amounts of grace, but I never forgot about it or stopped wanting it.” - Mark Vonnegut

14. “...men aren't in touch with their emotions, and don't share enough [?]” - Meg Cabot

15. “This was a characteroloical prelude, but it wasn’t chemical or somatic. It was the anatomy of melancholy, not the anatomy of his brain.” - Jeffrey Eugenides

16. “He had the feeling that there was something physically behind his eyes, blocking the light.” - Jeffrey Eugenides

17. “It was the face of a human being who’d been constructed exclusively of wounds. Not time or history or ambition, nothing but wounds. The face of a person who could probably kill someone without feeling anything whatsoever.” - Ryu Murakami

18. “I get absolutely shitfaced. I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old. I am having the time of my life.” - Marya Hornbacher

19. “You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

20. “Toni hears voices," said Trapp. "But who is this Dr. Ellsworth to tell her she's a schizophrenic? Maybe she just perceives better than the rest of us. Maybe the voices she hears are just uncommunicated ideas, floating free.” - Louis Sachar

21. “Sharon dropped to her knees and reached her hand over the edge. The gesture was supposed to be a sign of support. But she realized then that it was useless. His insanity was like the stream beneath the ground. It only flowed in one direction, into deeper and deeper darkness. She was going to lose him.” - Christopher Pike

22. “Brenda, do you know God loves you? He really does. To Him, you're perfect, absolutely perfect. You always have been.” - Nikki Rosen

23. “I admit I have Mental Illness so please no more 'Fruit Cakes' for Christmas Please” - Stanley Victor Paskavich

24. “Social psychologist argued that even severe mental illness was the result of society labeling unusual behavior rather than of biochemical processes.” - Thomas Scheff

25. “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

26. “What sticks with me now is that this man said he needed to get to a hospital. He probably needed to reach his destination more than anyone else on the bus, yet he lacked the capacity to ride without getting kicked off. Maybe he reached the hospital eventually, and maybe he was connected with social workers and housing specialists who will help him transform his life. But I fear he got on another bus, and another bus after that, without going anywhere at all.” - Susan Nielsen

27. “I mean, that's at least in part why I ingested chemical waste - it was a kind of desire to abbreviate myself. To present the CliffNotes of the emotional me, as opposed to the twelve-column read.I used to refer to my drug use as putting the monster in the box. I wanted to be less, so I took more - simple as that. Anyway, I eventually decided that the reason Dr. Stone had told me I was hypomanic was that he wanted to put me on medication instead of actually treating me. So I did the only rational thing I could do in the face of such as insult - I stopped talking to Stone, flew back to New York, and married Paul Simon a week later.” - Carrie Fisher

28. “My mom was sitting at the kitchen table. She’d set her coffee down, making a noise that made me look her way. I’d begun to notice her less and less often, like her colors were fading and blending in with walls. She was shrinking. Or maybe her sphere of influence in the family was shrinking. My dad glanced at her, too, and then wrote something on a napkin. He slid it across the counter to me—Don’t worry. Come home in one piece. Have fun and act like a sixteen-year-old for a change.” - Laura Anderson Kurk

29. “The maladies of the spirit alone, in abstracto, that is, error and sin, can be called diseases of the mind only per analogiam. They come not within the jurisdiction of the physician, but that of the teacher or clergyman, who again are called physicians of the mind only per analogiam.” - Ernst Von Feuchtersleben

30. “You're surrounded by people and voices and noises, but there you are, alone and trembling inside. And you want to be invisible. (thinking) Please, don't notice me.” - Kellie Elmore