mental illness Quotes

″“I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”″

″“Better in body perhaps—” I began, and stopped short, for he sat up straight and looked at me with such a stern, reproachful look that I could not say another word. “My darling,” said he, “I beg of you, for my sake and for our child’s sake, as well as for your own, that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish fancy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?”″

“Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. […] And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern—it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads.”

″[Jennie] is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession. I verily believe she thinks it is the writing which made me sick!”

“If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?”

“The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.”

“I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal—having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition. I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus—but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.”

“This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had! There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside-down.”

“I don’t like to look out of the windows even—there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?”

“There are things in that paper which nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day. It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don’t like it a bit. I wonder—I begin to think—I wish John would take me away from here!”

“There comes John’s sister. Such a dear girl as she is, and so careful of me! I must not let her find me writing. She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession. I verily believe she thinks it is the writing which made me sick!”

“I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus—but John says the very worst thing I can do is think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad. So I will let it alone and talk about the house.”

“It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house—to reach the smell. But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell.”

“John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious. I am glad my case is not serious! But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depressing. John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.”

“I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard! It is so pleasant to be out in this great room and creep around as I please! I don’t want to go outside. I won’t, even if Jennie asks me to. For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way.”

“So I take phosphates or phosphites—whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to “work” until I am well again. Personally, I disagree with their ideas.”

“John is a physician, and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster. You see he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do?”

“Dear John! He loves me very dearly, and hates to have me sick. I tried to have a real earnest reasonable talk with him the other day, and tell him how I wish he would let me go and make a visit to Cousin Henry and Julia. But he said I wasn’t able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there; and I did not make out a very good case for myself, for I was crying before I had finished.”

“You don’t like anything. You are the most depressed person I’ve ever met, and excuse me for saying this, but you are no fun to be around and I think you need professional help.”

“Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train moving while sitting still? Maybe I was just crazy. Maybe it was the 60’s. Or maybe I was just a girl… interrupted.”

“The fact is, I was sick, but not in an easily explained flu kind of way. It’s my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other recognizable disease just to make it simple for me and also for them.”

“People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can’t answer the real question. All I can tell them is, it’s easy. And it is easy to slip into a parallel universe. Most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening?”

“In the world’s terms, though, all of us were tainted.”

“Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?”

“The only way to stay sane is to go a little crazy.”

“Crazy isn’t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever.”

“Every window on Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.”

“It’s a fairly accurate portrait of me at eighteen, minus a few quirks like reckless driving and eating binges. It’s accurate but it isn’t profound.”

“Cynthia was depressive; Polly and Georgina were schizophrenic; I had a character disorder. Sometimes they called it a personality disorder. When I got my diagnosis it didn’t sound serious, but after a while it sounded more ominous than other people’s. I imagined my character as a plate or shirt that had been manufactured incorrectly and was therefore useless.”

“Only a third of PTSD sufferers receive treatment because it is tough to diagnose and a challenge to treat, a situation further complicated by the fact that sufferers are often hard to reach.”

“‘You’re a sad little hermit, and it creeps me out. So get dressed. We’re going bowling.’”

“The mental health burden of war that is placed upon civilian survivors is seldom granted the priority and resources it needs.”

“She called her dad instead. He sounded tired, but he wasn’t trying to replace the stairs with a water slide, so that was an improvement.”

“Unlike regular stressful events, such as moving to a new house, living with a chronic illness, suffering financial loss, or dealing with marital discord, traumatic events are so tremendous that individuals are rendered helpless by the force of the situation.”

″“Traumatic stress cuts to the heart of life, interfering with one’s capacity to love, create, and work - incapacity brought on not by poor lifestyle choices, moral weakness, or character flaws but by a complex interplay among biology, genes, and environment.”

“Psychological distress triggered by reminders of trauma, marked physiological reactions (such as sweating, breathing difficulties, or heart palpitations), intrusive memories, nightmares, and flashbacks are the five quintessential intrusive features of PTSD.”

“The attempt to avoid legitimate suffering lies at the root of all emotional illness.”

“When we avoid the legitimate suffering that results from dealing with problems, we also avoid the growth that problems demand from us. It is for this reason that in chronic mental illness we stop growing, we become stuck. And without healing, the human spirit begins to shrivel.”

“I used to fell a lot of guilt about having depression but then I realized that’s a lot like feeling guilty for having brown hair.”

“Life passes. Then comes the depression. That feeling that you’ll never be right again. The fear that these outbreaks will become more familiar, or worse, never go away. You’re so tired from fighting that you start to listen to all the little lies your brain tells you. The ones that say you’re a drain on your family. The ones that say that if you were stronger or better this wouldn’t be happening to you.”

“Whenever I start to doubt if I’m worth the eternal trouble of medication and therapy, I remember those people who let the fog win. And I push myself to stay healthy. I remind myself that I’m not fighting against me … I’m fighting against a chemical imbalance.”

“Last month, as Victor drove me home so I could rest, I told him that sometimes I felt like his life would be easier without me. He paused a moment in thought and then said, ‘It might be easier. But it wouldn’t be better.‘”

“I’m just broken. But in a way that makes me … me. My drugs don’t define me. I’m not psychotic. I’m not dangerous. The drugs I take are just a pinch of salt. A little seasoning in life, if you will.”

“Lots of people think that they’re a failure if their first or eighth cure for depression or anxiety doesn’t work the way they wanted. But an illness is an illness. It’s not your fault if the medication or therapy you’re given to treat your mental illness doesn’t work perfectly, or it worked for a while but then stopped working. You aren’t a math problem. You’re a person.”

“I don’t want to die. Really, I don’t. It’s not a lie. I’m not suicidal. I just feel like sometimes I can’t keep myself from hurting me. It’s like there’s someone else inside of me who needs to physically peel those bad thoughts out of my head and there’s no other way to get in there. The physical pain distracts me from the mental pain.”

“Brighter days are coming. Clearer sight will arrive. And you will arrive too. No, it might not be forever. These bright moments might be for a few days at a time, but hold on for those days. Those days are worth the dark.”

“If everything is perfect and I’m miserable, then is this as good as it gets? The answer is no. it gets better. You get better.”

“I can’t think of another type of illness where the sufferer is made to feel guilty and question their self-care when their medications need to be changed.”

“I hope to one day see a sea of people all wearing silver ribbons as a sign that they understand the secret battle, and as a celebration of the victories made each day as we individually pull ourselves up out of our foxholes to see our scars heal, and to remember what the sun looks like.”

“I’ve struggled with many forms of mental illness since I was a kid, but clinical depression is a semi-regular visitor and anxiety disorder is my long-term abusive boyfriend.”

“I can tell you that ‘Just cheer up’ is almost universally looked at as the most unhelpful depression cure ever. It’s pretty much the equivalent of telling someone who just had their legs amputated to ‘just walk it off.’ ”

″...For Doctor Diver to marry a mental patient? How did it happen? Where did it begin?”

“She was ‘nervous,’ she suffered ‘little spells’—such were the sheltering expressions used by those close to her. Not that the truth concerning ‘poor Bonnie’s afflictions’ was in the least a secret; everyone knew she had been an on-and-off psychiatric patient the last half-dozen years.”

“That Prendergast was a troubled young man was clear; that he might be dangerous seemed impossible. To anyone who met him, he appeared to be just another poor soul crushed by the din and filth of Chicago.”

“Mum seemed more and more often to sit gazing out of the window, oblivious to us.”

“I know I’ll be alright when we get out.”

“She was getting more and more headaches, and spending more time in our room.”

“Any problem that arose was too much for Mom now.”

“Highly sensitive children are not mentally ill and will not become mentally ill unless put under unusual stress.”

“Depression comes in bouts. Like boxing. Dad is in the blue corner.”

“You need to accept that you have a mental condition. You can’t heal if you don’t accept it, that’s just the way it is.”

“We are made up of different parts, some good, some bad, and a healthy mind can tolerate this ambivalence and juggle both good and bad at the same time. Mental illness is precisely about a lack of this kind of integration - we end up losing contact with the unacceptable parts of ourselves.”

″‘Dicey?’ ‘She loves us,’ Dicey muttered. ‘But that’s the only reason I can think of that might be true.’ ‘There’s nothing wrong with Maybeth. You know that.‘” “It runs in families. Hereditary craziness.

“He was a disappointed man. You could see that.”

“No one would listen or believe me, because everyone thought me mad; but you, who must know that I am not, listen to me, and believe me so afterwards if you will.”