Mental Illness Quotes - Page 8

Mental illness is a bigger problem than obesity and cardiovascular diseases in the modern western world but still we pay no homage to the philosophy of watching what we watch. We only worry about what we put in the body in the form of food and care very little, if at all, with what we consume in our minds.

Half of the time, the Holy Ghost tries to warn us about certain people that come into our life. The other half of the time he tries to tell us that the sick feeling we get in a situation is not the other person’s fault, rather it is our own hang-ups. A life filled with bias, hatred, judgment, insecurity, fear, delusion and self-righteousness can cloud the soul of anyone you meet. Our job is never to assume,instead it is to listen, communicate, ask questions then ask more, until we know the true depth of someone’s spirit.

Librarians are trained to be polite, patient, and helpful, no matter who stands across the reference desk.The most important thing is that we look them in the eye and take them seriously. Our work demands that we become dreamers, holding onto hope that our society can be better, that we affirm for our patrons that they are still part of this society, no matter how marginalized they have become. I was raised on the notion that the public library is a civilizing institution. And if our work calms someone's demons or teaches someone else how to treat the mentally ill with respect, then I am proud to be part of the process.

She was getting worse, but I knew that I had to stand by her. I knew the type of woman she really was and I needed to find a way to help her find herself. She didn’t give up on me when I hit bottom, so I wouldn’t give up on her.

The fatal weakness of most psychiatric historiographies lies in the historians' failure to give sufficient weight to the role of coercion in psychiatry and to acknowledge that mad-doctoring had nothing to do with healing.

Many people with Dissociative Disorders are very creative and used their creative capacities to help them cope with childhood trauma.p55

I don’t like psychiatrists,” Alecto told her. “Not because they don’t think I’m real, but because they have no idea what they’re doing.

Except then I wonder what it's like to feel normal because if you take away the things I've felt all my life--the insecurity, the pain, the loneliness, the absolute dissolution of any sane or rational thought during one of my more manic moods and the helplessness when I realize one of said manic moods is creeping up on me (like right now)--what's left after the fact? Emptiness?

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

I think maybe they come out into the grounds in nightwear. But no, in typical anorexic stype they have read the fashion magazines literally. This is their version of thin girls in strappy clothes.The girl in the petticoat talks to me, as Emma has done on occsasion, in a rather grand style, as if she is a 'lady' of some substance and I a visiting guest.Do they chat much about clothes? I ask Emma in the car.She shakes her head.So, does she, Emma, see the difference between underwear or nightwear and 'going out' clothes?'Yes,' she says, her voices strained again. 'But it's one of the things you don't know properly when you're ill and confused. You see these pictures and the people in the magazines are real for you.

I wasn't sure if it was safe for me to be sharing time and space with other people, who all seemed so much gentler and safer and less of a secret to themselves than I felt I was.

Advances in biological knowledge have highlighted the potential chronicity of effects of childhood maltreatment, demonstrating particular life challenges in managing emotions, forming and maintaining healthy relationships, healthy coping, and holding a positive outlook of oneself.

Of course, I should have known the kids would pop out in the atmosphere of Roberta's office. That's what they do when Alice is under stress. They see a gap in the space-time continuum and slip through like beams of light through a prism changing form and direction. We had got into the habit in recent weeks of starting our sessions with that marble and stick game called Ker-Plunk, which Billy liked. There were times when I caught myself entering the office with a teddy that Samuel had taken from the toy cupboard outside. Roberta told me that on a couple of occasions I had shot her with the plastic gun and once, as Samuel, I had climbed down from the high-tech chairs, rolled into a ball in the corner and just cried. 'This is embarrassing,' I admitted. 'It doesn't have to be.''It doesn't have to be, but it is,' I said.The thing is. I never knew when the 'others' were going to come out. I only discovered that one had been out when I lost time or found myself in the midst of some wacky occupation — finger-painting like a five-year-old, cutting my arms, wandering from shops with unwanted, unpaid-for clutter.In her reserved way, Roberta described the kids as an elaborate defence mechanism. As a child, I had blocked out my memories in order not to dwell on anything painful or uncertain. Even as a teenager, I had allowed the bizarre and terrifying to seem normal because the alternative would have upset the fiction of my loving little nuclear family.I made a mental note to look up defence mechanisms, something we had touched on in psychology.

Bipolar illness, manic depression, manic-depressive illness, manic-depressive psychosis. That’s a nice way of saying you will feel so high that no street drug can compete and you will feel so low that you wish you had been hit by a Mack truck instead.

I am here for readers to see parts of themselves during my dark days, but also for a better way of living in my triumphs and gained wisdom.

Insanity? The mental processes of a man with whom one disagrees, are always wrong. Where is the line between wrong mind and sane mind? It is inconceivable that any sane man can radically disagree with one's most sane conclusions.

I knew you were in charge of me but my mind broke on its own.

That’s what mountains do, they taunt you, lure you to the freedom of the wilderness, and it is fucking exhilarating.

Anybody can look at you. It's quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.

The idea to go West just fell into my lap from the sky. Go west, young man. That’s how the best ideas happen. Just out of nowhere. When you’re not even thinking. Like they’ve been created for you and you just have to reach out and grab them before someone else does.

According to Hoge and colleagues (2007), the key to reducing stigma is to present mental health care as a routine aspect of health care, similar to getting a check up or an X-ray. Soldiers need to understand that stress reactions-difficulty sleeping, reliving incidents in your mind, and emotional detachment-are common and expected after combat... The soldier should be told that wherever they go, they should remember that what they're feeling is "normal and it's nothing to be ashamed of.

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.

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?

And I felt like such a failure. I thought: I can't even do mental illness properly.

Here are three separate but similar things: shyness, introversion and social anxiety. You can have one, two or all three of these things simultaneously. A lot of the time people thing they're all the same thing, but that's just not true. Extroverts can be shy, introverts can be bold, and a condition like anxiety can strike whatever kind of social animal you are. Lots of people are shy. Shy is normal. A bit of anxiety is normal. Throw the two together, add some brain-signal error - a NO ENTRY sign on the neural highway from my brain to my mouth perhaps, though no one really knows - and you have me.

Guidance counselors always love to say, 'Just think positively,' but that's impossible when you have this thing inside of you, strangling every ounce of happiness you can muster. My body is an efficient happy-though-killing machine.

In response to threat and injury, animals, including humans, execute biologically based, non-conscious action patterns that prepare them to meet the threat and defend themselves. The very structure of trauma, including activation, dissociation and freezing are based on the evolution of survival behaviors. When threatened or injured, all animals draw from a "library" of possible responses. We orient, dodge, duck, stiffen, brace, retract, fight, flee, freeze, collapse, etc. All of these coordinated responses are somatically based- they are things that the body does to protect and defend itself. It is when these orienting and defending responses are overwhelmed that we see trauma.The bodies of traumatized people portray "snapshots" of their unsuccessful attempts to defend themselves in the face of threat and injury. Trauma is a highly activated incomplete biological response to threat, frozen in time. For example, when we prepare to fight or to flee, muscles throughout our entire body are tensed in specific patterns of high energy readiness. When we are unable to complete the appropriate actions, we fail to discharge the tremendous energy generated by our survival preparations. This energy becomes fixed in specific patterns of neuromuscular readiness. The person then stays in a state of acute and then chronic arousal and dysfunction in the central nervous system. Traumatized people are not suffering from a disease in the normal sense of the word- they have become stuck in an aroused state. It is difficult if not impossible to function normally under these circumstances.

I've grown up with an ethic, call it a part, that insists I hide my pain at all costs. As I talk, I feel this pain leaking out—not just the core symptom of BPD, but all the years of being blamed or ignored for my condition, and all the years I've blamed others for how I am. It's the pain of being told I was too needy even as could never get the help I needed.

Narcissists often feign oppression because narcissists always feel entitled.

Your EGO feeds on the volume of the mental clutter, the greater the intensity the more crystallized is your EGO. Man dominates and exherts his mental superiority over others. Be Aware! Stop Mental Clutter, Kill EGO, Be YOU!

Schizophrenia. Always a bitch.

[I have] occasional depersonalization disorder, (which makes me feel utterly detached from reality, but in less of a "this LSD is awesome" kind of way and more of a "I wonder what my face is doing right now" and "it sure would be nice to feel emotions again" sort of thing).

The country is not growing because the mental state of the people are retarded

Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still

Accepting a psychiatric diagnosis is like a religious conversion. It's an adjustment in cosmology, with all its accompanying high priests, sacred texts, and stories of religion. And I am, for better or worse, an instant convert.

The medical profession's classic prescription for coping with such predicaments, Primum non nocere (First, do no harm), sounds better than it is. In fact, it fails to tell us precisely what we need to know: What is harm and what is help? However, two things about the challenge of helping the helpless are clear. One is that, like beauty and ugliness, help and harm often lie in the eyes of the beholder--in our case, in the often divergently directed eyes of the benefactor and his beneficiary. The other is that harming people in the name of helping them is one of mankind's favorite pastimes.

The word is dissociate. There is no 'a' before the 'ss'. People invariably say dis-a-ssociate, which, if you're suffering Disso-ciative Identity Disorder/Multiple Personality Disorder, can be irritating. People then want to know how many personalities I have and the answer is: I don't know. The first book about Multiple Personality Disorder to make an impact was Flora Rheta Schreiber's Sybil, published in 1973, which carries the subtitle: The True and Extraordinary Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Separate Personalities. Corbett H. Thigpen and Hervey M. Cleckley published the controversial The Three Faces of Eve much earlier in 1957, and Pete Townshend from The Who wrote the song 'Four Faces'. People seem to feel safe with numbers. The truth is more complicated. The kids emerged over time. Billy, the boisterous five-year-old, was at first the most dominant. But he slowly stood aside for JJ, the self-confident ten-year-old who appears when Alice is under stress and handles complicated situations like travelling on the Underground and meeting new people. The first entity to visit was the external voice of the Professor. But he had a choir of accomplices without names. So, how many actual alter personalities are there? I would say more than fifteen and less than thirty, a combination of protectors, persecutors and friends - my own family tree.

Mental illness" is among the most stigmatized of categories.' People are ashamed of being mentally ill. They fear disclosing their condition to their friends and confidants-and certainly to their employers.

The ethics of psychiatric therapy is the very negation of the ethics of political liberty. The former embraces absolute power, provided it is used to protect and promote the patient's mental health. The latter rejects absolute power, regardless of its aim or use.

Sharon dropped to her knees and reached her hand over the edge. The gesture was supposed to be a sign of support. But she realized then that it was useless. His insanity was like the stream beneath the ground. It only flowed in one direction, into deeper and deeper darkness. She was going to lose him.

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.

The young and the old are defenseless against relatives who want to get rid of them by casting them in the role of mental patient,and against psychiatrists whose livelihood depends on defining them as mentally ill.

...I am uncontrollable and dangerous. But of course I do not say this to Jake, mostly because he has never been locked up and doesn't understand what it feels like to lose control, and he only wants to watch the football game now, and none of this means anything to him, because he has never been married and he has never lost someone like Nikki and he is not trying to improve his life at all, because he doesn't ever feel the war that goes on in my chest every single fucking day--the chemical explosions that light up my skull like the Fourth of July and the awful needs and impulses and...

Greed is a contagious mental illness without which civilization as we know it would not have been possible.

When mental [illness] increases until it reaches the danger point, do not exhaust yourself by efforts to trace back to original causes. Better accept them as inevitable and save your strength to fight against the effects.

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.

Perhaps she wasn't ill at all in the end, but simply more revealed.

You know how they say that if you think you might be going crazy, it’s proof that you’re not? Well, it’s a lie. One of many they tell you about mental illness.

She was my go-to person. I’d tell her everything. Now, all of those late-night phone calls, all the sleepovers at her house because I couldn’t deal with stuff at home, all the crying on her shoulder. It’s all gone. It’s like if she doesn’t know, then it didn’t happen, and if it didn’t happen then what exactly am I holding on to?” ~Stacey

It is painful for the plant which is myself to live in the atmosphere and light of this world. Somewhere an element is lacking which would permit me to continue.

I'm so good at beginnings, but in the end I always seem to destroy everything, including myself.

With thousands of years of history frozen in time, it's no wonder that many southerners like me romanticize the north as a place where we can freeze our former selves, thaw, and then bloom anew. Here it’s just you, the land, and your thoughts, and you can't leave until you've wrestled with yourself and emerged a survivor. But then again, the light is much more intense up here and everything looks different because of it. The sun hasn’t set in a couple of months, and you can see things much more clearly when it is light all of the time.

I thought the doctor's diagnosis was the first step to mending her. I know now that a diagnosis is taken in like an orphaned dog. We brought it home, unsure how to care for it, to live with it. It raised its hackles, snarled, hid in the farthest corner of the room; but it was ours, her diagnosis. The diagnosis was timid and confused, and genetically wired to strike out.

What do you fear when you fear everything? Time passing and not passing. Death and life. I could say my lungs never filled with enough air, no matter how many puffs of my inhaler I took. Or that my thoughts moved too quickly to complete, severed by a perpetual vigilance. But even to say this would abet the lie that terror can be described, when anyone who's ever known it knows that it has no components but is instead everywhere inside you all the time, until you recognize yourself only by the tensions that string one minute to the next. And yet I keep lying, by describing, because how else can I avoid this second, and the one after it? This being the condition itself: the relentless need to escape a moment that never ends.

The Kinsey staff asked questions of children, learning about sexuality in the family. And other psychologists, psychiatrists and paediatricians, including Benjamin Spock, explored this burgeoning field. As a result, it was known that children will naturally touch their genitals to experience a sense of pleasure. It was also known, from working with victims of childhood incest that small children will act in inappropriate sexual ways with adults if they are trained through abuse to do so. The methods used on Cheryl and the other 'lab rats' were meant to create an Alter personality that would both perform and tolerate sexual acts that are only appropriate for consenting adults. More important in their thinking, by limiting the experience to just one personality (ego state), the personality normally seen would behave like any other child who had not been sexually abused in any way.

After Abalyn said what she said, I panicked. Someone tells me I can't remember what I definitely do remember, and sometimes I panic. I'm not as used to it as I often pretend. As I pretend to be used to it, I mean to say. The false memories.

My good fortune is not that I've recovered from mental illness. I have not, nor will I ever. My good fortune lies in having found my life.

The fear of the drugs running out is manageable-the fear of time running down isn’t.

He was seemingly born not only with a gift for language, but with a particularly nasty clock which makes him go crazy every three years or so.

PTSD in its rawest form is a death sentence which causes many veterans and others to execute themselves in hope to be free.