Intellegence is a disease

Despair was strength. Despair was the scab and the scar. The walled city in a time of plague. A closed fortification. A sure thing, because it was always safer, less painful to stop trying than...

Public stigmaStereotypeNegative belief about a group (e.g., dangerousness, incompetence, character weakness)PrejudiceAgreement with belief and/or negative emotional reaction (e.g., anger, fear)DiscriminationBehavior response to prejudice (e.g., avoidance, withhold employment and housing opportunities, withhold help)Self-stigmaStereotypeNegative belief about the...

Forgive me for being chipper, but despair is desperately dull.

Certainly, it’s important to acknowledge and identify the effects of BPD on your life. It’s equally important to realize that it neither dictates who you are nor fixes your destiny.

To the men and women who changed Cheryl Hersha’s life, she was a continuation of the research that had first been conducted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Dr. Morton Prince. He...

The voices in my head that tell the other voices what to do are mean.

Our society tends to regard as a sickness any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system and this is plausible because when an individual doesn’t fit into the system it causes...

So, what role does memory play in the understanding and treatment of trauma? There is a form of implicit memory that is profoundly unconscious and forms the basis for the imprint trauma leaves on the...

Suicide is a form of murder— premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes some getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the...

While binge drinking is a significant issue, it is likely that many members of the public would be surprised by its categorisation as a mental illness, particularly at the milder end.”Public confusion caused by differing...

The distinction between diseases of “brain” and “mind,” between “neurological” problems and “psychological” or “psychiatric” ones, is an unfortunate cultural inheritance that permeates society and medicine. It reflects a basic ignorance of the relation between...

Alcohol ruined me financially and morally, broke my heart and the hearts of too many others. Even though it did this to me and it almost killed me and I haven’t touched a drop of...

Someday, I dream we will medically address mental illness in a way that helps people WITHOUT completely crippling them, creatively or robbing them of their precious sensitivity. No one wants to live life feeling like...

DID is about survival! As more people begin to appreciate this concept, individuals with DID will start to feel less as though they have to hide in shame. DID develops as a response to extreme...

The central mechanism of the avoidance mechanism of PTSD is the ego defense of denial

Inside my head is a jigsaw made of trillions and trillions and trillions of atoms. It might take a while.

People are screwed up in this world. I’d rather be with someone screwed and open about it than somebody perfect and…you know… ready to explode.

I need them to be aware and present with me in the midst of the storm, not just tell me what to do.

He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost.

We are Craiglockhart’s success stories. Look at us. We don’t remember, we don’t feel, we don’t think – at least beyond the confines of what’s needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard...

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

The depression was not incapacitating. It made it hard to take a lot of my suburban life seriously, but that was inextricably mingled with a growing consciousness of the larger brutalities of the world. Ethiopian...

Many so-called disorders of the mind are simply disorders of thought.

the pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will...

Logan looked at her and wondered how someone so beautiful could be so oblivious to their own beauty, how someone so smart could be so foolish to the extent of their own intellect and how...

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

The authors analyzed 695 news items. The content of 47.9% (n = 333) of the articles was not strictly related to mental illness, but rather clinical or psychiatric terms were used metaphorically, and frequently in...

The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.

I’ve never had anorexia, but I know it well. I see it on the street, in the gaunt and sunken face, the boney chest, the spindly arms of an emaciated woman. I’ve come to recognize...

The bravest thing I ever did was continuing my life when I wanted to die.

Uncommon anxiety came to us in common hours when other people were doing mundane things like taking out the trash or checking their phones. But there was nothing to be done for this. We couldn’t...

Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel says we are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember. Who am I, then, if my memory is impaired?

Calling it lunacy makes it easier to explain away the things we don’t understand.

People with BPD are like people with third degree burns over 90% of their bodies. Lacking emotional skin, they feel agony at the slightest touch or movement.

Haymitch isn’t thinking of arenas, but something else. “Johanna’s back in the hospital.”I assumed Johanna was fine, had passed her exam, but simply wasn’t assigned to a sharp shooters’ unit. She’s wicked with a throwing...

The vision I see in the mirror is me, who I am, supposedly, but that vision does not express the way my mind works or the way I feel inside. A realization creeps over me,...

The exegesis Fat labored on month after month struck me as a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one — in this case an attempt by a beleaguered mind to make sense out of the...

Social psychologist argued that even severe mental illness was the result of society labeling unusual behavior rather than of biochemical processes.

the essential feature of the Dissociative Disorders is a disruption in the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity,or perception

I’m not manic-just happy. It has been such a long time since I was happy. Please join me on my magic carpet for now.

Anger’s like a battery that leaks acid right out of meAnd it starts from the heart ’til it reaches my outer me

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...

If the social stress is physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, the way to treat the depression is to stop the abuse. Unfortunately, advocates of the biochemical treatment of depression have gone along with the view...

I was always asking myself why. Why am I feeling this? Thinking that if I knew the cause I could find the cure. But of course there was no reasonable why, at least not in...

Toni hears voices,” said Trapp. “But who is this Dr. Ellsworth to tell her she’s a schizophrenic? Maybe she just perceives better than the rest of us. Maybe the voices she hears are just uncommunicated...

But new love only lasts so long, and then you crash back into the real people you are, and from as high as we were, it’s a very long fall, and we hit the ground...

It’s not about blame or wallowing…you are all molded by so much more than a dysfunctional past, and you must ultimately take responsibility for creating the life you want.

I’ll say it again – mental illness is a physical illness. You wouldn’t consider going up to someone suffering from Alzheimers to yell, “Come on, get with it, you remember where you left your keys?”...

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.