42 Inspirational Mental Illness Quotes

In a world where mental illness affects millions, finding solace and strength in words can be an essential part of healing and understanding. Inspirational quotes have the power to uplift, comfort, and enlighten those navigating the complex landscape of mental health challenges. This carefully curated collection of 42 inspirational quotes offers a beacon of hope and resilience, drawing wisdom from a diverse array of voices and experiences. Through these words, we aim to provide a sense of connection and encouragement, reminding everyone that they are not alone in their journey and that there is always light to be found, even in the darkest of times.

1. “To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.” - Jeanette Winterson

2. “Am I a mindless fool? My life is a fragment, a disconnected dream that has no continuity. I am so tired of senselessness. I am tired of the music that my feelings sing, the dream music.” - Ross David Burke

3. “I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.” - Charles Bukowski

4. “A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.” - Guy de Maupassant

5. “If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.” - Socrates

6. “What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.” - Sylvia Plath

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

8. “We are Craiglockhart's success stories. Look at us. We don't remember, we don't feel, we don't think - at least beyond the confines of what's needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now?) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive.” - Pat Barker

9. “He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it's because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself. What looked like gentle contours from a distance were in fact sheer cliffs. Sometimes only a little of him was crazy, sometimes nearly all of him, but, as an adult, he was never entirely not crazy. What he'd seen of his id while trying to escape his island prison by way of drugs and alcohol, only to find himself even more imprisoned by addiction, seems never to have ceased to be corrosive of his belief in his lovability. Even after he got clean, even decades after his late-adolescent suicide attempt, even after his slow and heroic construction of a life for himself, he felt undeserving. And this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer, finally, than love.” - Jonathan Franzen

10. “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

11. “If suffering like hers had any use, she reasoned, it was not to the sufferer. The only way that an individual's pain gained meaning was through its communication to others.” - Diane Wood Middlebrook

12. “I’ve never had anorexia, but I know it well. I see it on the street, in the gaunt and sunken face, the boney chest, the spindly arms of an emaciated woman. I’ve come to recognize the flat look of despair, the hopelessness that follows, inevitably, from years of starvation. I think: That could have been [me]. It wasn’t. It’s not.” - Harriet Brown

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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “Cousin Mary hoped her journey through periods of dark and light was like that of a Swiss train toiling up the mountainside, in and out of tunnels but always a little farther up the hill at each emergence. But she could only hope that this was so, she did not feel it. It seemed to her that she did not advance at all and that what she was learning now was only to hold on. The Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass, she remembered, had had to run fast merely to stay where she was, but doubtless she had run in hope, disdaining despair; and hope, Cousin Mary discovered, when deliberately opposed to despair, was one of the tough virtues.” - Elizabeth Goudge

17. “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

18. “If you trade your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, and inexplicable grief.” - Brené Brown

19. “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

20. “Always remember, if you have been diagnosed with PTSD, it is not a sign of weakness; rather, it is proof of your strength, because you have survived!” - Michel Templet

21. “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

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

23. “Every lineament of the girl's wasted body is a testament to her inner turmoil. Willow can only imagine what kind of pain she must be in to destroy herself that way. She knows there's something ironic in her compassion for the other girl, but she can't help feeling that this utter mortification of the flesh is far worse than anything that she herself has done.” - Julia Hoban

24. “And Kate thought about a time, long ago, when she had witnessed an ongoing romance between two mental patients. As a teenager watching their unlikely relationship unfold in front of her, she had understood that people did whatever they needed to do to be happy, regardless of their unfortunate circumstances. She supposed her mother’s day care center was born out of the desire to feel needed, while making use of the skills that were practically all she had managed to acquire during decades of battling a debilitating illness.” - Sabrynne McLain

25. “Kate was about to protest when something caused her to look in her mother’s direction. She was standing statue-like in front of the television with that brave, painted-on smile. Then Kate realized what had caught her attention: her mother’s tear-filled eyes were reflecting the on-off motion of the blinkers like a watery mirror. Kate stared transfixed at the flashing points of light that betrayed her mother’s pain. The urge to tell her father how much she wanted him to be proud of her and how much he had hurt her, faded in the dark depths of her mother’s eyes.” - Sabrynne McLain

26. “Sometimes the world is so much sicker than the inmates of its institutions.” - Joanne Greenberg

27. “Haymitch isn't thinking of arenas, but something else. "Johanna's back in the hospital."I assumed Johanna was fine, had passed her exam, but simply wasn't assigned to a sharp shooters' unit. She's wicked with a throwing axe but about average with a gun. "Is she hurt? What happened?""It was while she was on the Block. They try to ferret out a soldier's potential weakness. So they flooded the street, " says Haymitch.This doesn't help. Johanna can swim. At least, I seem to remember her swimming around some in the Quarter Quell. Not like Finnick, of course, but none of us are like Finnick. "So?""That's how they tortured her in the Capitol. Soaked her then used electric shocks," says Haymitch. "In the Block, she had some kind of flashback. Panicked, didn't know where she was. She's back under sedation." Finnick and I just stand there as if we've lost the ability to respond.I think of the way Johanna never showers. How she forced herself into the rain like it was acid that day. I had attributed her misery to morphling withdrawal. "You two should go see her. You're as close to friends as she's got," says Haymitch.That makes the whole thing worse. I don't really know what's between Johanna and Finnick, but I hardly know her. No family. No friends.Not so much as a token from District 7 to set beside her regulation clothes in her anonymous drawer.Nothing.” - Suzanne Collins

28. “It felt like this was never going to end. The world wasn't going to stop crashing down until there was nothing left of me but dust.” - Keary Taylor

29. “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

30. “Am I cured?” “No. You’re someone who is different, but who wants to be the same as everyone else. And that, in my view, is a serious illness.” “Is wanting to be different a serious illness?” “It is if you force yourself to be the same as everyone else. It causes neuroses, psychoses, and paranoia. It’s a distortion of nature, it goes against God’s laws, for in all the world’s woods and forests, he did not create a single leaf the same as another. But you think it’s insane to be different, and that’s why you chose to live in Villete, because everyone is different here, and so you appear to be the same as everyone else. Do you understand?” Mari nodded. “People go against nature because they lack the courage to be different, and then the organism starts to produce Vitriol, or bitterness, as this poison is more commonly known.” - Paulo Coelho

31. “Are you crazy? It's a common phrase, I know. But it means something particular to me: the tunnels, the security screens, the plastic forks, the shimmering, ever-shifting borderline that like all boundaries beckons and asks to be crossed. I do not want to cross it again.” - Susanna Kaysen

32. “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

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

34. “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

35. “If you put the wrong foods in your body, you are contaminated and dirty and your stomach swells. Then the voice says, Why did you do that? Don't you know better? Ugly and wicked, you are disgusting to me.” - Bethany Pierce

36. “Depression: the healthy suspicion that modern life has no meaning and that modern society is absurd and alienating.” - Neel Burton

37. “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

38. “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

39. “With a damp palm, I turned the knob and cracked open the door. She was asleep in her freshly made bed. I can’t explain how relieved I felt for this simple mercy. She was here and safe on clean sheets.” - Laura Anderson Kurk

40. “There are sins much more serious than socio-pathologies which really are mental illnesses, whereas self-righteousness is an illness of the soul.” - R. Alan Woods

41. “My heart keeps begging me for a reason to keep beating, but I'm running out of lies to tell it” - Stephanie Ware

42. “I myself must also say I believe it is true that in the end humanitarianism will triumph; only I fear that at the same time the world will be one big hospital and each person will be the other person's humane keeper.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe