Mental Illness Quotes

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

His body had become a companion which seemed always about to leave him: it had its own pains which moved him to pity, and its own particular movements which he tried hard to follow. He had learned from it how to keep his eyes down on the road, so that he could see no one, and how important it was never to look back - although there were times when memories of an earlier life filled him with grief and he lay face down upon the grass until the sweet rank odour of the earth brought him to his senses. But slowly he forgot where it was he had come from, and what it was he was escaping.

Peter Ackroyd

A personality disorder is not the foreign presence of demonic possession or a cancerous cluster of cells spreading among the internal organs. It is a pattern of cognition and reaction that impares the capacity to be productive, happy and generally at ease. It is a fractured sense of self giving way to the weight of stressful interpersonal dynamics.

Merri Lisa Johnson

Have you ever suddenly realized it's someone else's mood swing and you're just along for the ride?

Alex Bosworth

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

Michael Lewis

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

There is clear evidence from internal investigations in the past that some raters actually see themselves as adversaries to veterans. If a claim can be minimized, then the government has saved money, regardless of the need of the veteran. Just recently, the press exposed an official e-mail from a high-level staff person who stated in essence that PTSD diagnosis was becoming too prevalent and offered ways to delay and deflect ratings in order to save the government money.

Taylor Armstrong

There will always be people afraid of the monsters in the night. They are usually the ones that look for them because they have proven they exist in themselves.

Shannon L. Alder

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

Trauma destroys the fabric of time. In normal time you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy or bouncing like a rubber ball from now to then to back again. ... In the traumatic universe the basic laws of matter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be mustard gas.

David J. Morris

Mental illness is not something you misunderstand in this era. Get educated because bias is no different than racism.

Shannon L. Alder

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

The pressure to reduce health care costs is aimed only at the treatment of real diseases. There is no pressure to reduce the costs of treating fictitious diseases. On the contrary, there is pressure to define ever more types of undesirable behaviors as mental disorders or addictions and to spend ever more tax dollars on developing new psychiatric diagnoses and facilities for storing and treating the victims of such diseases, whose members now include alcoholics, drug abusers, smokers, overeaters, self-starvers, gamblers, etc.

Thomas Szasz

The term 'deinstitutionalization' conceals some simple truths, namely, that old, unwanted persons, formerly housed in state hospitals, are now housed in nursing homes; that young, unwanted persons, formerly also housed in state hospitals, are now housed in prisons or parapsychiatric facilities; and that both groups of inmates are systematically drugged with psychiatric medications.

Thomas Szasz

Although Dissociative Disorders have been observed from the beginnings of psychiatry, the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R Dissociative Disorders (Steinberg 1985) was the first diagnostic instrument for the comprehensive evaluation of dissociative symptoms and to diagnose the presence of Dissociative Disorders.

Marlene Steinberg

The SCID-D may be used to assess the nature and severity of dissociative symptoms in a variety of Axis I and II psychiatric disorders, including the Anxiety Disorders (such as Posttraumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD] and Acute Stress Disorder), Affective Disorders, Psychotic Disorders, Eating Disorders, and Personality Disorders.The SCID-D was developed to reduce variability in clinical diagnostic procedures and was designed for use with psychiatric patients as well as with nonpatients (community subjects or research subjects in primary care).

Marlene Steinberg

Dissociative identity disorder is conceptualized as a childhood onset, posttraumatic developmental disorder in which the child is unable to consolidate a unified sense of self. Detachment from emotional and physical pain during trauma can result in alterations in memory encoding and storage. In turn, this leads to fragmentation and compartmentalization of memory and impairments in retrieving memory.2,4,19 Exposure to early, usually repeated trauma results in the creation of discrete behavioral states that can persist and, over later development, become elaborated, ultimately developing into the alternate identities of dissociative identity disorder.

Bethany L. Brand

Prior to the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), the diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder had been referred to as Multiple Personality Disorder. The renaming of this diagnosis has caused quite a bit of confusion among professionals and those who live with DID. Because dissociation describes the process by which DID begins to develop, rather than the actual outcome of this process (the formation of various personalities), this new term may be a bit un

Karen Marshall

Shortly after I began work with Teresa, I acquired another MPD client, a supposedly schizophrenic young man I will call Tony. He called in to the clinic on a day I was on telephone duty, saying he was having flashbacks of "ritual abuse.” I did not yet know what that was. Tony became my client. He could be quite entertaining. I have a vivid memory of him as a three-year-old, "Tiny Tony,” standing on his head on my office couch, and running down the hall to try unsuccessfully to make it to the bathroom. He had in his head the entire rock band of Guns’n’Roses, and I got to know Axl, the band leader, quite well. I remember the time Tony was in hospital and I went to visit him; Axl popped out and said, "Remember, we’re schizophrenic in here!

Alison Miller

Among DID individuals, the sharing of conscious awareness between alters exists in varying degrees. I have seen cases where there has appeared to be no amnestic barriers between individual alters, where the host and alters appeared to be fully cognizant of each other. On the other hand, I have seen cases where the host was absolutely unaware of any alters despite clear evidence of their presence. In those cases, while the host was not aware of the alters, there were alters with an awareness of the host as well as having some limited awareness of at least a few other alters. So, according to my experience, there is a spectrum of shared consciousness in DID patients. From a therapeutic point of view, while treatment of patients without amnestic barriers differs in some ways from treatment of those with such barriers, the fundamental goal of therapy is the same: to support the healing of the early childhood trauma that gave rise to the dissociation and its attendant alters.Good DID therapy involves promoting co-consciousness. With co-consciousness, it is possible to begin teaching the patient’s system the value of cooperation among the alters. Enjoin them to emulate the spirit of a champion football team, with each member utilizing their full potential and working together to achieve a common goal.Returning to the patients that seemed to lack amnestic barriers, it is important to understand that such co-consciousness did not mean that the host and alters were well-coordinated or living in harmony. If they were all in harmony, there would be no “disease.” There would be little likelihood of a need or even desire for psychiatric intervention. It is when there is conflict between the host and/or among alters that treatment is needed.

David Yeung

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

Meg Haston

Perfectionism is the unparalleled defense for emotionally abandoned children. The existential unattainability of perfection saves the child from giving up, unless or until, scant success forces him to retreat into the depression of a dissociative disorder, or launches him hyperactively into an incipient conduct disorder. Perfectionism also provides a sense of meaning and direction for the powerless and unsupported child. In the guise of self-control, striving to be perfect offers a simulacrum of a sense of control. Self-control is also safer to pursue because abandoning parents typically reserve their severest punishment for children who are vocal about their negligence.

Pete Walker

Dissociative Disorders have a high rate of responsiveness to therapy and that with proper treatment, their prognosis is quite good.

Marlene Steinberg

It was like I'd climbed Everest, had the summit in my sight, the flag in my hand, all ready to pierce it into the top of the mountain and say, "Whoopdedoo, I made it," and then an avalanche from out of nowhere swept me right back to the bottom of the mountain again. Was it worth bothering to try and climb it again? I was exhausted. I'd already climbed it. I didn't want to...but, then, what other choice was there?

Holly Bourne

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

Narcissists often feign oppression because narcissists always feel entitled.

Criss Jami

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

Shannon Mullen

My mind feels like a race car on the track, getting faster and faster every time I pause to think or blink or try to focus on anything. Nothing can keep up to it, not the other cars, not my body, not anyone else in the bar. It’s a rush, pure exhilaration, and I’m having the time of my life. But instead of driving, I’m in the passenger seat, along for the ride, watching myself race around the track from my barstool.

Shannon Mullen

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.

Shannon Mullen

~~You are not alone~~ No, really. Literally. Maybe you have always known (or suspected) this. Maybe this news is shocking, baffling, dismaying, even unbelievable to you. Despite what you might believe or may have been told about yourself, you are not just 'moody'. Nor are you crazy or defective or possessed. You have what is commonly called 'multiple personalities'.

A.T.W.

The shrinks call it Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. I call it hell. The demons are waiting in each corner, ready to drag me back to the battlefield.- Puncture Wounds (2014)

James Coyne

Someone said once that they'd never heard of a crime they couldn't imagine committing, and I realized then that if I had a daughter and she had a rabbit and that rabbit was alone with me and I was feeling the way I felt right now and I had a way to kill that rabbit and the time to spend killing that rabbit then killing the rabbit was something I could imagine myself possibly doing or at least considering doing or being on the edge of doing. And smearing a husband with the blood wasn't such a far step after that if you had a desire to smear your husband with blood and smearing someone with blood was something I could imagine a situation calling for because there were at least a few people in this world that I wouldn't not like to see smeared with blood—one person being Werner for fucking my plans, for sending me back out into a life with my wildebeest, to figure out a way to live here and I didn't want to do that and I didn't know how to do that and I wasn't sure how I was going to do that—

Catherine Lacey

Every few minutes or so I would remember the look from the man who had wanted fifty cents, and I'd look at that framed memory hanging in myself and it meant I was here, back in this sick city, but in other ways I was not here at all and anyone who looked closely could see that I had nothing to give, that I was a junk drawer, a collection of things that may or may not have had a use.

Catherine Lacey

I am not the heroine of this story.And I'm not trying to be cute. It's the truth. I'm diagnosed borderline and seriously fucked-up. I hold grudges. I bottle my hate until it ferments into poison, and then I get high off the fumes. I'm completely dysfunctional and that's the way I like it, so don't expect a character arc where I finally find Redemption, Growth, and Change, or learn How to Forgive Myself and Others.

Leah Raeder

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

Elyn R. Saks

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.

Daniel José Older

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

Did I imagine the castle, the dungeon, the ritual orgies and violations? Did Lucy, Billy, Samuel, Eliza, Shirley and Kato make it all up? I went back to the industrial estate and found the castle. It was an old factory that had burned to the ground, but the charred ruins of the basement remained. I closed my eyes and could see the black candles, the dancing shadows, the inverted pentagram, the people chanting through hooded robes. I could see myself among other children being abused in ways that defy imagination. I have no doubt now that the cult of devil worshippers was nothing more than a ring of paedophiles, the satanic paraphernalia a cover for their true lusts: the innocent bodies of young children.

Alice Jamieson

As a child I had been taken to see Dr Bradshaw on countless occasions; it was in his surgery that Billy had first discovered Lego. As I was growing up, I also saw Dr Robinson, the marathon runner. Now that I was living back at home, he was again my GP. When Mother bravely told him I was undergoing treatment for MPD/DID as a result of childhood sexual abuse, he buried his head in hands and wept.Child abuse will always re-emerge, no matter how many years go by. We read of cases of people who have come forward after thirty or forty years to say they were abused as children in care homes by wardens, schoolteachers, neighbours, fathers, priests. The Catholic Church in the United States in the last decade has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for 'acts of sodomy and depravity towards children', to quote one information-exchange web-site. Why do these ageing people make the abuse public so late in their lives? To seek attention? No, it's because deep down there is a wound they need to bring out into the clean air before it can heal. Many clinicians miss signs of abuse in children because they, as decent people, do not want to find evidence of what Dr Ross suggests is 'a sick society that has grown sicker, and the abuse of children more bizarre'. (Note: this was written in the UK many years before the revelations of Jimmy Savile's widespread abuse, which included some ritual abuse)

Alice Jamieson

Some alters are what Dr Ross describes in Multiple Personality Disorder as 'fragments', which are 'relatively limited psychic states that express only one feeling, hold one memory or carry out a limited task in the person's life. A fragment might be a frightened child who holds the memory of one particular abuse incident.' In complex multiples, Dr Ross continues, the `personalities are relatively full-bodied, complete states capable of a rang of emotions and behaviours.' The alters will have `executive control some substantial amount of time over the person life'. He stresses, and I repeat his emphasis, 'Complex MPD with over 15 alter personalities and complicated amnesic barriers are associated with 100 percent frequency of childhood physical, sexual and emotional abuse.

Alice Jamieson

It is a rare person who can cut himself off from mediate and immediate relations with others for long spaces of time without undergoing a deterioration in personality.

Harry Stack Sullivan

Police intentionally murdering a mentally unstable person will always be unacceptable when there are numerous other non-lethal options available to them.

Steven Magee

I was struck by the image of Daddy still dressed in that same plaid shirt and undershirt with the bloodstains below the neck, the one I had first seen him wearing in the jail the previous day.

Earl B. Russell

It is hard to bring paedophile rings to justice. Thankfully it does happen. Perhaps the most horrific recent case came before the High Court in Edinburgh in June 2007. It involved a mother who stood by and watched as her daughter of nine was gang-raped by members of a paedophile ring at her home in Granton, in the north of Edinburgh. The mother, Caroline Dunsmore, had allowed her two daughters to be used in this way from the age of five. Sentencing Dunsmore to twelve years in prison judge, Lord Malcolm, said he would take into account public revulsion at the grievous crimes against the two girls. He told the forty-three-year-old woman: 'It is hard to imagine a more grievous breach of trust on the part of a mother towards her child.' Morris Petch and John O'Flaherty were also jailed for taking part in raping the children. Child abuse nearly always takes place at home and members of the family are usually involved.

Alice Jamieson

Jail has become the biggest mental health hospital.

Steven Magee

I repeat one of my mantras. 'This is not happening. This is not real. This did not happen to you. That was someone else.

Emily Andrews

When you have a persistent sense of heartbreak and gutwrench, the physical sensations become intolerable and we will do anything to make those feelings disappear. And that is really the origin of what happens in human pathology. People take drugs to make it disappear, and they cut themselves to make it disappear, and they starve themselves to make it disappear, and they have sex with anyone who comes along to make it disappear and once you have these horrible sensations in your body, you’ll do anything to make it go away.

Bessel A. van der Kolk

Kessa ran her fingers over her stomach. Flat. But was it flat enough? Not quite. She still had some way to go. Just to be safe, she told herself. Still, it was nice the way her pelvic bones rose like sharp hills on either side of her stomach. I love bones. Bones are beautiful.

Steven Levenkron

Blame is a Defense Against PowerlessnessBetrayal trauma changes you. You have endured a life-altering shock, and are likely living with PTSD symptoms— hypervigilance, flashbacks and bewilderment—with broken trust, with the inability to cope with many situations, and with the complete shut down of parts of your mind, including your ability to focus and regulate your emotions.Nevertheless, if you are unable to recognize the higher purpose in your pain, to forgive and forget and move on, you clearly have chosen to be addicted to your pain and must enjoy playing the victim.And the worst is, we are only too ready to agree with this assessment! Trauma victims commonly blame themselves. Blaming oneself for the shame of being a victim is recognized by trauma specialists as a defense against the extreme powerlessness we feel in the wake of a traumatic event. Self-blame continues the illusion of control shock destroys, but prevents us from the necessary working through of the traumatic feelings and memories to heal and recover.

Sandra Lee Dennis

My painful memories sift through me like sand through stretched fingers. Only small pieces cling and stay around for me to keep, the rest just disappear. I know not where and I don’t

Willow Madison

People never like pollution, it has become very wrong to like pollution at all. But just like there are good and bad things about people, there are good and bad things about pollution. If people were pollution we would get rid of anyone who was different, anyone who was considered an inconvenience… but we’d be getting rid of a life, a lot of lives… because we didn’t like them. If pollution was a person would we still be trying to get rid of it? Would we have environmentalists still complaining and protesting and trying to get rid of all pollution?

Rebecca McNutt

With DID patients, if they feel hostility or aggression they take it out on themselves with self-harm... They’re self-destructive and repeatedly suicidal, more so than any other psychological disorder. So that's what's typical – not this wild aggression, or stalking women [or robbery].- Dr Bethany Brand, on Billy Milligan and Multiple Personality Disorder (DID)

Bethany L. Brand

We who were not so pathologically far out on the spectrum of self-involvement, we dwellers of the visible spectrum who could imagine how it felt to go beyond violet but were not ourselves beyond it, could see that David was wrong not to believe in his lovability and could imagine the pain of not believing in it. How easy and natural love is if you are well! And how gruesomely difficult--what a philosophically daunting contraption of self-interest and self-delusion love appears to be--if you are not! And yet ... the difference between well and not well is in more respects a difference of degree than of kind. Even though David laughed at my much milder addictions and liked to tell me that I couldn't even conceive of how moderate I was, I can still extrapolate from these addictions, and from the secretiveness and solipsism and radical isolation and raw animal craving that accompany them, to the extremity of his. I can imagine the sick mental pathways by which suicide comes to seem like the one consciousness-quenching substance that nobody can take away from you.

Jonathan Franzen

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

Andrei Lankov

Self Hate: The deadliest 'dis-ease' experienced by wounded souls.

T.F. Hodge

Persons Are Turned against Themselves Evil also turns a person against herself so that self is used against self. The case of the woman who received a dismissal letter from her pastor comes to mind again. The psychological decompensation she suffered was successfully used by her husband to intercede with a psychiatrist of his choosing to commit her to the mental unit of a hospital for an extended involuntary stay, which further worsened her condition. Additional examples abound. Some patients report cults using induced hypnotic states to encourage a subject's dissociated hands and arms to do something hurtful to someone else. In such cases, the subject is encouraged to watch the hand that is hers but not hers (because it is dissociated from her). The end result is often extreme guilt. self-loathing, and distrust of one's self and motives.An incestuous parent may use a child's own natural bodily responses to repeated sexual stimulation to make the point that the child really "wants and enjoys“ what is being forced upon her.

J. Jeffrey Means

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 this chapter I restrict myself to exploring the nature of the amnesia which is reported between personality states in most people who are diagnosed with DID. Note that this is not an explicit diagnostic criterion, although such amnesia features strongly in the public view of DID, particularly in the form of the fugue-like conditions depicted in ﬁlms of the condition, such as The Three Faces of Eve (1957). Typically, when one personality state, or ‘alter’, takes over from another, they have no idea what happened just before. They report having lost time, and often will have no idea where they are or how they got there. However, this is not a universal feature of DID. It happens that with certain individuals with DID, one personality state can retrieve what happened when another was in control. In other cases we have what is described as ‘co-consciousness’ where one personality state can apparently monitor what is happening when another personality state is in control and, in certain circumstances, can take over the conversation.

John Morton

You’re innocent until proven guilty,” Mandy exclaimed, unable to hide her gleeful smile. She missed the way people used to have normal conversations, used to be more caring for each other than themselves, back in the Seventies and Eighties. These days, she realized, neighbors kept to themselves, their kids kept to themselves, nobody talked to each other anymore. They went to work, went shopping and shut themselves up at home in front of glowing computer screens and cellphones… but maybe the nostalgic, better times in her life would stay buried, maybe the world would never be what it was. In the 21st century music was bad, movies were bad, society was failing and there were very few intelligent people left who missed the way things used to be… maybe though, Mandy could change things. Thinking back to the old home movies in her basement, she recalled what Alecto had told her. “We wanted more than anything else in the world to be normal, but we failed.” The 1960’s and 1970’s were very strange times, but Mandy missed it all, she missed the days when Super-8 was the popular film type, when music had lyrics that made you think, when movies had powerful meanings instead of bad comedy and when people would just walk to a friend’s house for the afternoon instead of texting in bed all day. She missed soda fountains and department stores and non-biodegradable plastic grocery bags, she wished cellphones, bad pop music and LED lights didn’t exist… she hated how everything had a diagnosis or pill now, how people who didn’t fit in with modern, lazy society were just prescribed medications without a second thought… she hated how old, reliable cars were replaced with cheap hybrid vehicles… she hated how everything could be done online, so that people could just ignore each other… the world was becoming much more convenient, but at the same time, less human, and her teenage life was considered nostalgic history now.Hanging her head low, avoiding the slightly confused stare of the cab driver through the rear view mirror, she started crying uncontrollably, her tears soaking the collar of her coat as the sun blared through the windows in a warm light.

Rebecca McNutt

Repression. Her therapist, Dr. Solomon, loved the word. He'd say it slowly, letting it roll off his tongue. Sometimes he'd add a chin stroke for good measure. He always looked pleased when he did this, like he'd discovered the Caramilk secret or something.

Jo Ann Yhard

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