If the mind fits, shrink it.

We all have problems, but let’s not kid ourselves: it’s how we deal with them that makes the difference.

The tattoo artist inflicts pain and I take it. With each breath I count to one again. Each inhale, each exhale, time passes in the smallest of pieces, and pieces still smaller than those.This is...

One of the things that baffles me (and there are quite a few) is how there can be so much lingering stigma with regards to mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder. In my opinion, living with...

Bipolar robs you of that which is you. It can take from you the very core of your being and replace it with something that is completely opposite of who and what you truly are....

Sanity is over-rated. It lacks color.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

Any time I let it, the weight of living creeps in and starts to drag her down. It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely...

He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it’s because he never quite felt that...

This was a characteroloical prelude, but it wasn’t chemical or somatic. It was the anatomy of melancholy, not the anatomy of his brain.

After my first few tastes I was pretty much hooked. I’d have dry spells, months without any or only piddling amounts of grace, but I never forgot about it or stopped wanting it.

Her parents, she said, has put a pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The red balls told her when she should laugh, the blue ones when she should be silent...

I finally understood what could drive kids to show up with guns and shoot up their schools.

There’s memory clutter, which reminds you of an important person, achievement, or event from your past. I think memory clutter often gathers in the homes of people with some degree of depression. And then there’s...

I resolved to come right to the point. “Hello,” I said as coldly as possible, “we’ve got to talk.””Yes, Bob,” he said quietly, “what’s on your mind?” I shut my eyes for a moment, letting...

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...

Never give up on someone with a mental illness. When “I” is replaced by “We”, illness becomes wellness.

Never has nostalgia held stronger sway; never has the belief in the redemptive possibilities of the future seemed so laughable.

This isn’t normal. This isn’t how normal people think. Fuck off, world- what the hell is normal anyway?

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.

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.

In my opinion, our health care system has failed when a doctor fails to treat an illness that is treatable.

The drug I take is called schizophrenia, among other labels, which I desperately want to put away. I want to put the drug of schizophrenia down, and I want to put down the stigma surrounding...

I swear that I will never cause trouble for anybody, as long as I live!! So please! Nobody cause any trouble for me, either!!

All the skills from DBT glom together, a mass of acronyms without any meaning. I pull out the DBT books and paw through the pages. Something has to help. Then I find these words: ‘The...

[…] I was afraid to board a streetcar because of the conductor; I was afraid to enter the Kabuki Theater for fear of the usherettes standing along the sides of the red-carpeted staircase at the...

Many people say that psychiatrists just want to push drugs. Well I seriously have to say, without medication, I’d be locked up in a VA hospital somewhere.

We all feel inadequate very often. It’s only when it gets chronic that it is disturbing to one’s emotions and can get out of hand and make you pretty damn miserable.

All this, and much more, she had accepted, for, after all, living does mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case, mere possibilities of improvement. She thought of...

It is time to embrace mental health and substance use/abuse as illnesses. Addiction is a disease.

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...

Now, Emily didn’t make a sound. There was something more defining about the soundless reality that condemned the paradigm of passion.

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.

The programme into which Cheryl was inducted combined all the different ways the intelligence community had learned could cause intense psychological change in adults and children. It had been learned through the use of both...

That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.

To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.

…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...

At the lip of a cliff, I look out over Lake Superior, through the bare branches of birches and the snow-covered branches of aspens and pines. A hard wind blows snow up out of a...

The first time I saw her,Everything in my head went quiet.

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

When you read my poems or quotes remember you’re stepping into the mind that steps outside of me

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...

She was now drowning in that pool of desires without having any idea about the depth of it.

You will never know the moon or stars, unless you breathe in their solar system and inspect it from many diverse vantage points as possible.

Oh! This’ll impress you – I’m actually in the Abnormal Psychology textbook. Obviously my family is so proud. Keep in mind though, I’m a PEZ dispenser and I’m in the abnormal Psychology textbook. Who says...

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

Oh, hell, no. I’m insane, but that would be nuts.

Depression is a phobia of happiness.

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...

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...