Mental Health Stigma Quotes

Although stigmatizing attitudes are not limited to mental illness, the public seems to disapprove persons with psychiatric disabilities significantly more than persons with related conditions such as physical illness (34-36). Severe mental illness has been likened to drug addiction, prostitution, and criminality (37,38). Unlike physical disabilities, persons with mental illness are perceived by the public to be in control of their disabilities and responsible for causing them (34,36). Furthermore, research respondents are less likely to pity persons with mental illness, instead reacting to psychiatric disability with anger and believing that help is not deserved (35,36,39)."World Psychiatry. 2002 Feb; 1(1): 16–20.PMCID: PMC1489832Understanding the impact of stigma on people with mental illnessPATRICK W CORRIGAN and AMY C WATSON

Patrick W. Corrigan

In my view, the spurning of DID is highly connected with knowing and not knowing about child sexual abuse. Side by side with denial of childhood trauma and of severe dissociation, is an unmistakable cognizance of dissociative processes as they are embedded in our language. We regularly say things such as, "pull yourself together", "he is coming unglued", "she was beside herself", "don't fall apart", "he's not all there", "she was shattered", and so on.

Elizabeth Howell

In 2006, there is no army of recovered memory therapists, and Dr McNally’s assumptions about patients with PTSD and those working in this field are troubling. Owing to past debates, those working in the PTSD field are perhaps more knowledgeable than others about malingered, factitious, and iatrogenic variants.Why, then, does Dr McNally attack PTSD as a valid diagnosis, demean those working in the field, and suggest that sufferers are mostly malingered or iatrogenic, while giving little or no consideration is given to such variants of other psychiatric conditions? Perhaps the trauma field has been “so often embroiled in serious controversy” (4, p 816) for the same reason Dr McNally and others have trouble imagining the traumatization of a Vietnam War cook or clerk. One theory suggests that there is a conscious decision on the part of some individuals to deny trauma and its impact. Another suggests that some individuals may use dissociation or repression to block from consciousness what is quite obvious to those who listen to real-life patients."Cameron, C., & Heber, A. (2006). Re: Troubles in Traumatology, and Debunking Myths about Trauma and Memory/Reply: Troubles in Traumatology and Debunking Myths about Trauma and Memory. Canadian journal of psychiatry, 51(6), 402.

Colin Cameron

The history of hysteria is a history of the relation between the colonizing father and the colonized devalued other.

Judith L. Alpert

Every time you feel like mocking a person you disagree with politically by implying that they are mentally ill, I want you to instead imagine you are talking to every single person who actually is mentally ill and telling them they are worthless. That's how it makes mentally ill people feel. Doesn't seem very progressive now does it?

Ariel Howland

Despite the growing clinical and research interest in dissociative symptoms and disorders, it is also true that the substantial prevalence rates for dissociative disorders are still disproportional to the number of studies addressing these conditions. For example, schizophrenia has a reported rate of 0.55% to 1% of the normal population (Goldner, Hus, Waraich, & Somers, more or less similar to the prevalence of DID. Yet a PubMed search generated 25,421 papers on research related to schizophrenia, whereas only 73 publications were found for DID-related research.

Paul H. Blaney

To resist a compulsion with willpower alone is to hold back an avalanche by melting the snow with a candle. It just keeps coming and coming and coming.

David Adam

Officially, it is no more possible to be a little bit OCD than it is to be a little bit pregnant or a little bit dead.

David Adam

Even though I know that breaking your brain is the same as breaking your arm, I'm still ashamed that my brain is broken.

A.S. King

Too often the survivor is seen by [himself or] herself and others as "nuts," "crazy," or "weird." Unless her responses are understood within the context of trauma. A traumatic stress reaction consists of *natural* emotions and behaviors in response to a catastrophe, its immediate aftermath, or memories of it. These reactions can occur anytime after the trauma, even decades later. The coping strategies that victims use can be understood only within the context of the abuse of a child. The importance of context was made very clear many years ago when I was visiting the home of a Holocaust survivor. The woman's home was within the city limits of a large metropolitan area. Every time a police or ambulance siren sounded, she became terrified and ran and hid in a closet or under the bed. To put yourself in a closet at the sound of a far-off siren is strange behavior indeed—outside of the context of possibly being sent to a death camp. Within that context, it makes perfect sense. Unless we as therapists have a good grasp of the context of trauma, we run the risk of misunderstanding the symptoms our clients present and, hence, responding inappropriately or in damaging ways.

Diane Mandt Langberg

In the same way that the women's movement of the seventies and eighties brought rape and incest into public consciousness, we can do the same with the causes and reality of dissociation and multiplicity.

Carolyn Spring

I cut myself up really badly with the lid of a tin can. They took me to the emergency room, but I couldn’t tell the doctor what I had done to cut myself—I didn’t have any memory of it. The ER doctor was convinced that dissociative identity disorder didn’t exist. . . . A lot of people involved in mental health tell you it doesn’t exist. Not that you don’t have it, but that it doesn’t exist.

Bessel A. van der Kolk

Here I want to stress that perception of losing one’s mind is based on culturally derived and socially ingrained stereotypes as to the significance of symptoms such as hearing voices, losing temporal and spatial orientation, and sensing that one is being followed, and that many of the most spectacular and convincing of these symptoms in some instances psychiatrically signify merely a temporary emotional upset in a stressful situation, however terrifying to the person at the time. Similarly, the anxiety consequent upon this perception of oneself, and the strategies devised to reduce this anxiety, are not a product of abnormal psychology, but would be exhibited by any person socialized into our culture who came to conceive of himself as someone losing his mind.

Erving Goffman

My therapist told me that I over-analyze everything. I explained to him that he only thinks this because of his unhappy relationship with his mother.

Michelle Templet

The process of reforming the mental health system never includes the complaints that families and caregivers have regarding a need for increased access to resources, treatment, education, and financial support. Reform has continued to ignore the basic needs of families and suffering individuals with severe mental illness and special needs.

Tamara Hill

The mentally ill frighten and embarrass us. And so we marginalize the people who most need our acceptance. What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candor, more unashamed conversation.

Glenn Close

This disease comes with a package: shame. When any other part of your body gets sick, you get sympathy.

Ruby Wax

Severe mental illness has been likened to drug addiction, prostitution, and criminality (37,38). Unlike physical disabilities, persons with mental illness are perceived by the public to be in control of their disabilities and responsible for causing them (34,36). Furthermore, research respondents are less likely to pity persons with mental illness, instead reacting to psychiatric disability with anger and believing that help is not deserved (35,36,39).Understanding the impact of stigma on people with mental illness. World Psychiatry. Feb 2002; 1(1): 16–20.PMCID: PMC1489832PATRICK W. CORRIGAN and AMY C. WATSON

Matthew W. Corrigan

Stigmas speak to the idea of difference and how difference shames us and those we know.

Michael Lewis

People who live with mental illnesses are among the most stigmatized groups in society.Fighting the stigma caused by mental disorders: past perspectives, present activities, and future directions. World Psychiatry. Oct 2008; 7(3): 185–188. PMCID: PMC2559930

Heather Stuart

Public stigmatStereotypetNegative belief about a group (e.g., dangerousness, incompetence, character weakness)PrejudicetAgreement with belief and/or negative emotional reaction (e.g., anger, fear)DiscriminationtBehavior response to prejudice (e.g., avoidance, withhold employment and housing opportunities, withhold help)Self-stigmatStereotypetNegative belief about the self (e.g., character weakness, incompetence)PrejudicetAgreement with belief, negative emotional reaction (e.g., low self-esteem, low self-efficacy)DiscriminationtBehavior response to prejudice (e.g., fails to pursue work and housing opportunities)Understanding the impact of stigma on people with mental illness. World Psychiatry. Feb 2002; 1(1): 16–20.PMCID: PMC1489832

Matthew W. Corrigan

I had people saying 'it's all in your head'. Do you honestly think I want to feel this way?

Sonia Estrada

1 in 5 people have dandruff. 1 in 4 people have mental health problems. I've had both.

Ruby Wax

Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, but stigma and bias shame us all.

Bill Clinton

I'm not the kind of person who likes to shout out my personal issues from the rooftops, but with my bipolar becoming public, I hope fellow sufferers will know it's completely controllable. I hope I can help remove any stigma attached to it, and that those who don't have it under control will seek help with all that is available to treat it.

Catherine Zeta-Jones

Results of two independent factor analyses of the survey responses of more than 2000 English and American citizens parallel these findings (19,33):- fear and exclusion: persons with severe mental illness should be feared and, therefore, be kept out of most communities;- authoritarianism: persons with severe mental illness are irresponsible, so life decisions should be made by others;- benevolence: persons with severe mental illness are childlike and need to be cared for."World Psychiatry. 2002 Feb; 1(1): 16–20.PMCID: PMC1489832Understanding the impact of stigma on people with mental illnessPATRICK W CORRIGAN and AMY C WATSON

Patrick W. Corrigan

Several themes describe misconceptions about mental illness and corresponding stigmatizing attitudes. Media analyses of film and print have identified three: people with mental illness are homicidal maniacs who need to be feared; they have childlike perceptions of the world that should be marveled; or they are responsible for their illness because they have weak character (29-32)."World Psychiatry. 2002 Feb; 1(1): 16–20.PMCID: PMC1489832Understanding the impact of stigma on people with mental illnessPATRICK W CORRIGAN and AMY C WATSON

Patrick W. Corrigan

Sometimes the people around you won't understand your journey. They don't need to, it's not for them.

Joubert Botha

No one would ever say that someone with a broken arm or a broken leg is less than a whole person, but people say that or imply that all the time about people with mental illness.

Elyn R. Saks

The uncomfortable, as well as the miraculous, fact about the human mind is how it varies from individual to individual. The process of treatment can therefore be long and complicated. Finding the right balance of drugs, whether lithium salts, anti-psychotics, SSRIs or other kinds of treatment can be a very hit or miss heuristic process requiring great patience and classy, caring doctoring. Some patients would rather reject the chemical path and look for ways of using diet, exercise and talk-therapy. For some the condition is so bad that ECT is indicated. One of my best friends regularly goes to a clinic for doses of electroconvulsive therapy, a treatment looked on by many as a kind of horrific torture that isn’t even understood by those who administer it. This friend of mine is just about one of the most intelligent people I have ever met and she says, “I know. It ought to be wrong. But it works. It makes me feel better. I sometimes forget my own name, but it makes me happier. It’s the only thing that works.” For her. Lord knows, I’m not a doctor, and I don’t understand the brain or the mind anything like enough to presume to judge or know better than any other semi-informed individual, but if it works for her…. well then, it works for her. Which is not to say that it will work for you, for me or for others.

Stephen Fry

In talking with people that have experienced it, I learned that PTSD is something that a person in a position of authority sometimes thinks they’re not supposed to have. They don’t always have an avenue to personally address it or even discuss it.

Stana Katic

Unfortunately, mental health is so misunderstood that some people think you have to be crazy to need to speak to a therapist.

Nicole Curtis

Beautiful things have been broken before…

S.R. Crawford

A panic attack is pathological exaggeration of the body’s normal response to fear, stress or excitement.

Abhijit Naskar

It’s hard to imagine a more squarely on-the-nose example of demonizing mental illness than portraying a mentally ill man as a literal demon.

Charles Bramesco

To actually accept that you have an eating disorder or a mental health issue is actually a sign of great, great strength. It is not a sign of weakness at all.

Nigel Owens

While a psychiatric diagnosis can serve a purpose in treatment plans, it should not become a tool to discredit a person's disclosure of abuse.

Lee Ann Hoff

The stigma of mental illness is first and foremost a social justice issue!

Patrick W. Corrigan

Self-stigma refers to the state in which a person with mental illness has come to internalize the negative attitudes about mental illness and turns them against him- or herself.

Patrick W. Corrigan

There needs to be a nationwide awareness programme for all NHS staff, to educate them about dissociative disorders. Diagnoses need to be more obtainable within the NHS; people's lives should be placed ahead of funding restraints and bureaucratic red tape. We need minimum standards of care and treatment agreed and implemented within the NHS to end the current nightmare of the postcode lottery—not just guidelines that can be ignored but actual regulations.

Carol Broad

Those with dissociative disorders face a big enough battle living as multiples and dealing with past trauma. Like everyone else, they deserve to be heard and recognised, not stigmatised.

Carol Broad

And if we do speak out, we risk rejection and ridicule. I had a best friend once, the kind that you go shopping with and watch films with, the kind you go on holiday with and rescue when her car breaks down on the A1. Shortly after my diagnosis, I told her I had DID. I haven't seen her since. The stench and rankness of a socially unacceptable mental health disorder seems to have driven her away.

Carolyn Spring

They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.

Nathaniel Lee

Stigma against mental illness is a scourge with many faces, and the medical community wears a number of those faces.

Elyn R. Saks

Holding one's self responsible is a critical feature in stigma and in the generation of shame since violation of standards, rules, and goals are insufficient in its elicitation unless responsibility can be placed on the self. Stigma may differ from other elicitors of shame and guilt, in part because it is a social appearance factor. The degree to which the stigma is socially apparent is the degree to which one must negotiate the issue of blame, not only for one's self but between one's self and the other who is witness to the stigma. Stigmatization is a much more powerful elicitor of shame and guilt in that it requires a negotiation not only between one's self and one's attributions, but between one's self and the attributions of others.

Michael Lewis

Although enlightened people know that an extreme phobia wasn't a form of madness, hey could not help but regard it as odd.

Dean Koontz

Anxiety is the monster that resides within.

Karon Waddell

You’re not fine. You’re not. And that’s OK. The first thing I want you to do is to finally tell yourself that it’s OK not to be OK. To accept that you’re feeling badly and that something isn’t right. Too many of us are in denial because we think that to admit there’s something wrong means we’re weak or broken or odd. I don’t know if it’s society, or just who we associate with, but we need to change our way of thinking. We are not weak. We are not broken. We are not odd.

S.R. Crawford

Having a child who is struggling doesn't make you a bad parent, just as being a child who is struggling doesn't make your child a bad kid.

Ann Douglas

Never stand in the way of letting God use people’s actions, in order to solve a greater issue in the world.

Shannon L. Alder

To not have your suffering recognized is an almost unbearable form of violence.

Andrei Lankov

Before you call yourself a Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu or any other theology, learn to be human first.

Shannon L. Alder

As special as it is to listen to your friends argue over whether or not you have a mental illness,I'm starting to get the urge to go back to class.

Kendare Blake

You can’t be beaten by something you laugh at.

Jonathan Harnisch

I believe the perception of what people think about DID is I might be crazy, unstable, and low functioning. After my diagnosis, I took a risk by sharing my story with a few friends. It was quite upsetting to lose a long term relationship with a friend because she could not accept my diagnosis. But it spurred me to take action. I wanted people to be informed that anyone can have DID and achieve highly functioning lives. I was successful in a career, I was married with children, and very active in numerous activities. I was highly functioning because I could dissociate the trauma from my life through my alters. Essentially, I survived because of DID. That's not to say I didn't fall down along the way. There were long term therapy visits, and plenty of hospitalizations for depression, medication adjustments, and suicide attempts. After a year, it became evident I was truly a patient with the diagnosis of DID from my therapist and psychiatrist. I had two choices. First, I could accept it and make choices about how I was going to deal with it. My therapist told me when faced with DID, a patient can learn to live with the live with the alters and make them part of one's life. Or, perhaps, the patient would like to have the alters integrate into one person, the host, so there are no more alters. Everyone is different.The patient and the therapist need to decide which is best for the patient. Secondly, the other choice was to resist having alters all together and be miserable, stuck in an existence that would continue to be crippling. Most people with DID are cognizant something is not right with themselves even if they are not properly diagnosed. My therapist was trustworthy, honest, and compassionate. Never for a moment did I believe she would steer me in the wrong direction. With her help and guidance, I chose to learn and understand my disorder. It was a turning point.

Esmay T. Parker

Janna knew - Rikki knew — and I knew, too — that becoming Dr Cameron West wouldn't make me feel a damn bit better about myself than I did about being Citizen West. Citizen West, Citizen Kane, Sugar Ray Robinson, Robinson Crusoe, Robinson miso, miso soup, black bean soup, black sticky soup, black sticky me. Yeah. Inside I was still a fetid and festering corpse covered in sticky blackness, still mired in putrid shame and scorching self-hatred. I could write an 86-page essay comparing the features of Borderline Personality Disorder with those of Dissociative Identity Disorder, but I barely knew what day it was, or even what month, never knew where the car was parked when Dusty would come out of the grocery store, couldn't look in the mirror for fear of what—or whom—I'd see. ~ Dr Cameron West describes living with DID whilst studying to be a psychologist.

Cameron West

We must understand that those who experience abuse as children, and particularly those who experience incest, almost invariably suffer from a profound sense of guilt and shame that is not meliorated merely by unearthing memories or focusing on the content of traumatic material. It is not enough to just remember. Nor is achieving a sense of wholeness and peace necessarily accomplished by either placing blame on others or by forgiving those we perceive as having wronged us. It is achieved through understanding, acceptance, and reinvention of the self. At this point in time there are people who question the validity of the DID diagnosis. The fact is that DID has its own category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders because, as with all psychiatric conditions, a portion of society experiences a cluster of recognizable symptoms that are not better accounted for by any other diagnosis.

Cameron West

Having DID is, for many people, a very lonely thing. If this book reaches some people whose experiences resonate with mine and gives them a sense that they aren't alone, that there is hope, then I will have achieved one of my goals. A sad fact is that people with DID spend an average of almost seven years in the mental health system before being properly diagnosed and receiving the specific help they need. During that repeatedly misdiagnosed and incorrectly treated, simply because clinicians fail to recognize the symptoms. If this book provides practicing and future clinicians certain insight into DID, then I will have accomplished another goal. Clinicians, and all others whose lives are touched by DID, need to grasp the fundamentally illusive nature of memory, because memory, or the lack of it, is an integral component of this condition. Our minds are stock pots which are continuously fed ingredients from many cooks: parents, siblings, relatives, neighbors, teachers, schoolmates, strangers, acquaintances, radio, television, movies, and books. These are the fixings of learning and memory, which are stirred with a spoon that changes form over time as it is shaped by our experiences. In this incredibly amorphous neurological stew, it is impossible for all memories to be exact.But even as we accept the complex of impressionistic nature of memory, it is equally essential to recognize that people who experience persistent and intrusive memories that disrupt their sense of well-being and ability to function, have some real basis distress, regardless of the degree of clarity or feasibility of their recollections. We must understand that those who experience abuse as children, and particularly those who experience incest, almost invariably suffer from a profound sense of guilt and shame that is not meliorated merely by unearthing memories or focusing on the content of traumatic material. It is not enough to just remember. Nor is achieving a sense of wholeness and peace necessarily accomplished by either placing blame on others or by forgiving those we perceive as having wronged us. It is achieved through understanding, acceptance, and reinvention of the self.

Cameron West

Been under treatment for PTSD and bipolar since 1992. I’m not ashamed of my illness. I’ve been shunned by many and I feel for those shunned, too.

Stanley Victor Paskavich

I think the stigma attached to mental illness will disappear just like it did for cancer years ago.

Sally Graham

1 2 Next

Mental Health Stigma Quotes

Related Topics