Mental Illness Quotes

“The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“But pain's like water. It finds a way to push through any seal. There's no way to stop it. Sometimes you have to let yourself sink inside of it before you can learn how to swim to the surface.”
― Katie Kacvinsky

“The true definition of mental illness is when the majority of your time is spent in the past or future, but rarely living in the realism of NOW.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“After being hurt by the world so much, they began to see the demons within humans. So without hiding it through trickery, they worked to express it.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“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.”
― Francesca Zappia, Made You Up

“What people don't understand about depression is how much it hurts. It's like your brain is convinced that it's dying and produces an acid that eats away at you from the inside, until all that's less is a scary hollowness. Your mind fills with dark thoughts; you become convinced that your friends secretly hate you, you're worthless, and then there's no hope. I never got so low as to consider ending it all, but I understand how that can happen to some people. Depression simply hurts too much.”
― Tyler Hamilton

“It’s so weird, to know you’re crazy and not be able to do anything about it, you know? It’s not like you believe yourself to be normal. You know there is a problem. But you can’t figure a way through to fixing it. Because you can’t be sure, you know?”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“My dark days made me strong. Or maybe I already was strong, and they made me prove it.”
― Emery Lord, When We Collided

“I have never seen battles quite as terrifyingly beautiful as the ones I fight when my mind splinters and races, to swallow me into my own madness, again.”
― Nicole Lyons, Hush

“What is society but an individual? [...] The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This was how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror at the illusion of the ocean called the world.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

“Don’t ask me those questions! Don’t ask me what life means or how we know reality or why we have to suffer so much. Don’t talk about how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun. I don’t want to hear about the tiger in the corner or the Angel of Death or the phone calls from John the Baptist.”
― Susanna Kaysen

“It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis,' or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“Sometimes, you will go through awful trials in your life and then a miracle happens--God heals you. Don’t be disheartened when the people you love don’t see things like you do. There will be Pharisees in your life that will laugh it off, deny that it happened, or will mock your experience based on righteousness they think you don't possess. God won't deny you a spiritual experience because you are not a spiritual leader. He loves everyone equal. The only people that really matter in life are the people that can “see” your heart and rejoice with you.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“In my opinion, our health care system has failed when a doctor fails to treat an illness that is treatable.”
― Kevin Alan Lee, The Split Mind: Schizophrenia from an Insider's Point of View

“Sometimes I feel dead," I told her, "and I hate everybody.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“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, When the Music's Over: My Journey into Schizophrenia

“The scariest thing of all is never knowing what you're suddenly going to believe.”
― Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep

“The best thing about rock bottom is the rock part. You discover the solid bit of you. The bit that can't be broken down further. The thing that you might sentimentally call a soul. At our lowest we find the solid ground of our foundation. And we can build ourselves anew.”
― Matt Haig, The Comfort Book

“The first time I saw her,
Everything in my head went quiet.”
― Neil Hilborn

“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

“You see demons in the eyes of the world, and the world sees a bottomless pit in yours.”
― Neal Shusterman, Challenger Deep

“If only his mind were as easy to fix as his body.”
― Han Nolan, Crazy

“The distinction between diseases of "brain" and "mind," between "neurological" problems and "psychological" or "psychiatric" ones, is an unfortunate cultural inheritance that permeates society and medicine. It reflects a basic ignorance of the relation between brain and mind. Diseases of the brain are seen as tragedies visited on people who cannot be blamed for their condition, while diseases of the mind, especially those that affect conduct and emotion, are seen as social inconveniences for which sufferers have much to answer. Individuals are to be blamed for their character flaws, defective emotional modulation, and so on; lack of willpower is supposed to be the primary problem.”
― António R. Damásio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain

“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, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family

“I’ve found that it’s of some help to think of one’s moods and feelings about the world as being similar to weather.

Here are some obvious things about the weather:

It's real.
You can't change it by wishing it away.
If it's dark and rainy, it really is dark and rainy, and you can't alter it.
It might be dark and rainy for two weeks in a row.

BUT
it will be sunny one day.
It isn't under one's control when the sun comes out, but come out it will.
One day.

It really is the same with one's moods, I think. The wrong approach is to believe that they are illusions. Depression, anxiety, listlessness - these are all are real as the weather - AND EQUALLY NOT UNDER ONE'S CONTROL.
Not one's fault.

BUT
They will pass: really they will.

In the same way that one really has to accept the weather, one has to accept how one feels about life sometimes, "Today is a really crap day," is a perfectly realistic approach. It's all about finding a kind of mental umbrella. "Hey-ho, it's raining inside; it isn't my fault and there's nothing I can do about it, but sit it out. But the sun may well come out tomorrow, and when it does I shall take full advantage.”
― Stephen Fry

“Isolated, she managed somehow to feel free—albeit with a freedom that made her want to smash a hole in the very center of the universe.”
― Flora Rheta Schreiber, Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“Thirty seconds of pure awareness is a long time, especially after a lifetime of escaping yourself at all costs.”
― Kiera Van Gelder, The Buddha and the Borderline: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder through Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Buddhism, and Online Dating

“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, Anne Sexton: A Biography

“If you can sit with your pain, listen to your pain and respect your pain — in time you will move through your pain.”
― Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

“The Slice and Dice Fanatic uses his sexual skills to lure his victims into his realm of fun.”
― RB Le `Deach, My Graphic Bipolar Fantasies: & Other Short Stories