Mental illness quotes

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◆ I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible...

- Elizabeth Wurtzel100

◆ I am tired of people saying that poor character is the only reason people do wrong things. Actually, circumstances cause people to act a certain way. It's from those circumstances that a person's attitude is affected followed by weakening of character. Not the reverse. If we had no faults of our own, we should not take so much pleasure in noticing those in others and judging their lives as either black or white, good or bad. We all live our lives in shades of gray.

- Shannon L. Alder99

◆ 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 Jamison99

◆ The problem with having problems is that ‘someone' always has it worse.

- Tiffany Madison99

◆ 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.

- Socrates99

◆ Basically, all women are nurturers and healers, and all men are mental patients to varying degrees.

- Nelson DeMille99

◆ 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 Burke99

◆ 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 Brown99

◆ 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 Schreiber99

◆ 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 Hornbacher99

◆ I had officially joined the cacophony of sick mother fuckers.

- Betsy Lerner99

◆ the intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness if my mind's flight made it very difficult for me to believe once i was better, that the illness was one i should willingly give up....moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable reactions to what life has dealt....even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life.

- Kay Redfield Jamison99

◆ I wanted to tell her that if only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head, but the idea seemed so involved and wearisome that I didn't say anything. I only burrowed down further in the bed.

- Sylvia Plath99

◆ Except you cannot outrun insanity, anymore than you can outrun your own shadow.

- Alyssa Reyans99

◆ People say to the mentally ill, ‘You know so many people think the world of you.' But when they don't like themselves they don't notice anything. They don't care about what people think of them. When you hate yourself, whatever people say it doesn't make sense. ‘Why do they like me? Why do they care about me?' Because you don't care about yourself at all.

- Richey Edwards99