I see now the virtue in madness, for this country knows no law nor any boundary. I pity the poor shades confined to the Euclidean prison that is sanity

Don’t worry, everyone is mentally ill, they just haven’t figured out a name for yours yet.

Mental illness People assume you aren’t sick unless they see the sickness on your skin like scars forming a map of all the ways you’re hurting. My heart is a prison of Have you tried?s...

That was the crux. You. Only you could work on you. Nobody could force you, and if you weren’t ready, then you weren’t ready, and no amount of open-armed encouragement was going to change that.

Sometimes the people around you won’t understand your journey. They don’t need to, it’s not for them.

Falling in love happens so suddenly that it seems, all at once, that you have always been in love.

I myself must also say I believe it is true that in the end humanitarianism will triumph; only I fear that at the same time the world will be one big hospital and each person...

The men and women who continue to hold Lynn’s mind hostage against her will believe the future will be tilled with terrorism, death, destruction and a challenge to the survival of America. They believe Lynn...

Why do they always prescribe thyroid medicine to go with the mental illness cocktails they whip up?

And then I realized that my sister was trying to LIVE a romance novel. Man, that takes courage and imagination. Well, it also took some degree of mental illness, too, but I was suddenly happy...

It’s amazing the things that the heart and mind can endure. No one ever told me that growing up, so I often spent my childhood thinking something was wrong with me.

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.

My reflection followed me mercilessly in mirrors, car doors, shop windows. I lived in a world of circus mirrors, the grotesque distortion of my body looking back at me everywhere.

I could think of nothing but the loneliness, of being stuck in that glass room with only OCD for company. OCD, the bully; OCD, the oppressor; OCD, the destroyer of lives; OCD.

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.

My life isn’t good or bad. It’s an incredible series of emotional and mental extremes, with beautiful thunderstorms and stunning sunrises.Some would say this is my artistic temperament. Others would say i am mentally ill...

As an undergraduate student in psychology, I was taught that multiple personalities were a very rare and bizarre disorder. That is all that I was taught on … It soon became apparent that what I...

I needed some space to lay myself out, so that I could decide which pieces I wanted to pick up.

We all talk to ourselves. Those we call mad just talk a little louder.

The horror of the Pit lay in the emergence from it, with the return of her will, her caring, and her feeling of the need for meaning before the return of meaning itself.

Yet I also recognize this: Even if everyone in the world were to accept me and my illness and validate my pain, unless I can abide myself and be compassionate toward my own distress, I...

Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s...

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,...

At cocktail parties, I played the part of a successful businessman’s wife to perfection. I smiled, I made polite chit-chat, and I dressed the part. Denial and rationalization were two of my most effective tools...

The physical shape of Mollies paralyses and contortions fit the pattern of late-nineteenth-century hysteria as well — in particular the phases of “grand hysteria” described by Jean-Martin Charcot, a French physician who became world-famous in...

Kate was about to protest when something caused her to look in her mother’s direction. She was standing statue-like in front of the television with that brave, painted-on smile. Then Kate realized what had caught...

fallen” mental health system

Today I am a lens, a pen, a gun.

We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

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...

Speaker says psychology has commandeered “everything hard” and partitioned it from Scripture with the assumption that its causes are biological

Denial and minimizing is often seen in genuine PTSD and, hence, should be a target of detection and measurement.

A sick thought can devour the body’s flesh more than fever or consumption.

And while a bald head and a looped ribbon were seen as badges of courage and hope, her reluctant vocabulary and vanishing memories advertised mental instability and impending insanity. Those with cancer could expect to...

Children of the mentally ill learn early on how not to be a bother, especially if they grew up with neglect. As my sister insisted once, when she was in severe pain after injuring her...

Every lineament of the girl’s wasted body is a testament to her inner turmoil. Willow can only imagine what kind of pain she must be in to destroy herself that way. She knows there’s something...

I wonder if there is anyone who is not depraved. A wearisome thought.I want money. Unless I have it….In my sleep, a natural death!

Bipolar is an illness not a hopeless destination it can be maintained with proper medication

What I didn’t say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.

One of the paradoxical and transformative aspects of implicit traumatic memory is that once it is accessed in a resourced way (through the felt sense), it, by its very nature, changes. Out of the shattered...

The true definition of mental illness is when the majority of your time is spent in the past or future, but rarely living in the realism of NOW.

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,...

You can talk about depression as a “chemical imbalance” all you want, but it presents itself as an external antagonist – a “demon,” a “beast,” or a “black dog,” as Samuel Johnson called it. It...

People who live with mental illnesses are among the most stigmatized groups in society.Fighting the stigma caused by mental disorders: past perspectives, present activities, and future directions. World Psychiatry. Oct 2008; 7(3): 185–188. PMCID: PMC2559930

Soon I find myself squatting on the floor. I am still striking my face; not with my fists this time, but with wide-open hands. I am slapping myself. The sounds I make when my palms...

If suffering like hers had any use, she reasoned, it was not to the sufferer. The only way that an individual’s pain gained meaning was through its communication to others.

If I was lonely, if I was afraid of being alone, then why abandon myself? Why run to someone else looking to give myself the thing that only I could give? I wanted to escape...

Severe mental illness has been likened to drug addiction, prostitution, and criminality (37,38). Unlike physical disabilities, persons with mental illness are perceived by the public to be in control of their disabilities and responsible for...

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...

Owing to a poorly defined sense of self, people with BPD rely on others for their feelings of worth and emotional caretaking. So fearful are they of feeling alone that they may act in desperate...