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1 " 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. "
― Shannon L. Alder
2 " [I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions. "
― Sam Harris , The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
3 " If there is one central intellectual reality at the end of the twentieth century, it is that the biological approach to psychiatry--treating mental illness as a genetically influenced disorder of brain chemistry--has been a smashing success. Freud's ideas, which dominated the history of psychiatry for the past half century, are now vanishing like the last snows of winter. "
― , A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac
4 " When it comes to mental illness most of the diagnoses are similar or the same yet they can never display how we individually go through our pain. "
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5 " When you have mental illness it's common to be shunned by your family or friends it wouldn't happen if they knew the pain you were in. "
6 " Kaysen elaborates through parts of the book on her thoughts about how mental illness is treated. She explains that families who are willing to pay the rather high costs of hospitalization do so to prove their own sanity. Once one member of the family is hospitalized, it becomes easier for the rest of the family to distance themselves from the problem and to create a clear boundary between the sane and the insane. Recognizing a family member or friend as insane makes others around them, says Kaysen, compare themselves to that individual. Hospitalization allows for distance from this questioning of self that makes us so uncomfortable. Her view that mental illness often includes the entire family means the hospitalized family member becomes an excuse for other family members not to look at their own problems. This explains the willingness to pay the high financial costs of hospitalization. "
― Susanna Kaysen , Girl, Interrupted
7 " This system that has been created for us, stifles the mind, thus the profuse amount of mental illness among society. To hold back a fluid being from mental development is to ask for trouble. When society begins to exhibit the symptoms of this break down, the creators of this system decided to label the behavior mental illnesses, so as to ensure that blame is placed upon the individual. You cannot blame someone who might have developed into someone great, for the break down of their mental constitution; it's to be expected. "
8 " 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 inscrutable. Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that -- as if that weren't enough -- but you, like Fat, ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know. "
9 " A lot of people believe that mental illness does not affect our children within the school system. But the truth is that a lot of bullying stems from untreated or poorly treated mental and behavioral health problems. "
― Támara Hill , Mental Health In A Failed American System: What Every Parent, Family, & Caregiver Should Know
10 " It's not that there are no challenges to becoming a vegetarian or vegan, but in the media, including authors of popular books on food and food politics, contribute to the 'enfreakment' of what is so often patronizingly referred to as the vegan or vegetarian 'lifestyle.' But again, the marginalization of those who care about animals is nothing new. Diane Beers writes in her book For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States that 'several late nineteenth-century physicians concocted a diagnosable for of mental illness to explain such bizarre behavior. Sadly, they pronounced these misguided souls suffered from " zoophilpsychosis." ' As Beers describes, zoophilpsychosis (an excessive concern for animals) was more likely to be diagnosed in women, who were understood to be 'particularly susceptible to the malady.' As the early animal advocacy movement in Britain and the United States was largely made up of women, such charges worked to uphold the subjugation both of women and of nonhuman animals. "
11 " The " pathology of normalcy" rarely deteriorates to graver forms of mental illness because society produces the antidote against such deterioration. When pathological processes become socially patterned, they lose their individual character. On the contrary, the sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology and arranged the means to give satisfactions which fit the pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation, in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society - and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic. "
12 " Its little wonder anxiety, depression and other mental illness is at such a high point at this time in the world; people have little control over the mental capacities, of their thoughts, perceptions, feelings and emotions. People never get a moments silence from the constant bombardment and when they do they don’t know how to manage their thoughts so the endless barrage of noise simply continues giving them no time or space for clarity. "
― Evan Sutter , Solitude: How Doing Nothing Can Change the World
13 " This system that has been created for us, stifles the mind, thus why some suffer from mental illness; especially those who internalize their condition. To hold back a fluid being from mental development is asking for trouble. In anticipation of this, the creators of this chaotic system, thought to create a response to such a breakdown, and when society began to display such behaviors, they created mental illness diagnoses, so as to ensure that blame could be placed on the individual for their behavior. You cannot blame someone who might have developed into someone great, for the break down of their mental constitution; it's to be expected in such a system as we have. "
14 " There is a dead space between most people and those afflicted with Mental Illness and it's called Understanding "
― , Stantasyland: Stantasyland: Quips, Quotes & Quandaries
15 " I think the stigma attached to mental illness will disappear just like it did for cancer years ago. "
16 " I admit I have Mental Illness so please no more 'Fruit Cakes' for Christmas Please "
― , Return to Stantasyland
17 " Just to let you know I don't post my books and things on the net in hopes of being rich. The reason is. " I am a person with Bipolar Disorder" and they're are a lot of great minds on the " Famous Bipolar" list that died penniless. If I do the same it's no big deal but having a form of mental Illness I would love to get my name on the Bipolar list also one day. Preferably while I'm still living so I can make sure they spelled it right "
18 " 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 they underwent a chemical lobotomy, that is not living. And, " Normal" needs a much broader definition... perhaps we could just replace that word with, " harmonious living. "
19 " It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window. "
20 " Some people think mental illness is a matter of mood, a matter of personality. They think depression is simply a form of being sad, that OCD is a form of being uptight. They think the soul is sick, not the body. It is, they believe, something that you have some choice over.I know how wrong this is.When I was a child, I didn't understand. I would wake up in a new body and wouldn't comprehend why things felt muted, dimmer. Or the opposite--I'd be supercharged, unfocused, like a radio at top volume flipping quickly from station to station. Since I didn't have access to the body's emotions, I assumed the ones I was feeling were my own. Eventually, though, I realized these inclinations, these compulsions, were as much a part of the body as its eye color or its voice. Yes, the feelings themselves were intangible, amorphous, but the cause of the feelings was a matter of chemistry, biology.It is a hard cycle to conquer. The body is working against you. And because of this, you feel even more despair. Which only amplifies the imbalance. It takes uncommon strength to live with these things. But I have seen that strength over and over again. "
― David Levithan , Every Day (Every Day, #1)
