Quotes about mental-health-stigma

I keep moving ahead, as always, knowing deep down inside that I am a good person and that I am worthy of a good life.

In my community, mental health isn't taken seriously enough. Therapy is replaced by prayer. Tears are a sign of weakness. When you are different, you are told to change. And really, what does that do? It isolates desperate, vulnerable people and creates victims.

I can understand why some people might look at me and say, 'What's she got to be depressed about?' I get that a lot in Britain, where mental health issues seem to be a big taboo.

Stop shying away from people. If you actually took a moment to listen to what they have to say, they might just say something that will change your life.

There’s nothing worse than bottling something up inside and letting it eat at you. It’s like being shot, and leaving the bullet inside our bodies. The wound would never heal. Instead, we need to let it out.

Psychotropic drugs have also been organized according to structure (e.g., tricyclic), mechanism (e.g., monoamine, oxidase inhibitor [MAOI]), history (first generation, traditional), uniqueness (e.g., atypical), or indication (e.g., antidepressant). A further problem is that many drugs used to treat medical and neurological conditions are routinely used to treat psychiatric disorders.

There is a moral imperative to seeing mental health through the same lens we use for other pathologies or illnesses. Being sad or overwhelmed is normal, much as being short of breath after a run is normal. Both become abnormal when they happen with no apparent cause and are hard to stop. Those situations need medical attention.

Mental imbalance is about as acceptable as herpes. It’s never going to be accepted. But really, it’s a disease just like cancer. It just happens, and eats away all the good parts of your brain, like judgment and happiness and perception and memory and life. And you can die from depression just like any other disease. And it’s not as if people choose it. So why is it still a joke of medicine? “She died of cancer.” is a lot more socially acceptable to people than “She committed suicide.

Take it from me, that kind of torment causes you to retreat to a place in your mind where you are so strong that nothing and no one can bother you. Or so you think! What you don't realize is that each time an incident occurs, you retreat inside of yourself a little bit at a time, until one day you might not recognize who YOU are.

My mother smiled. "I knew my baby wasn't like that."I looked at her. "Like what?""Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital." She paused. "I knew you'd decide to be all right again.

Why, when you have a mental disease, is it always considered an act of imagination? Why is it that every organ in your body can get sick and you get sympathy except the brain?

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?" Let us shout it from the rooftops until everyone gets the message; depression has and nothing to do with having a bad day or being sad, it's a killer if not taken seriously.

It's an unfortunate word, 'depression', because the illness has nothing to do with feeling sad, sadness is on the human palette. Depression is a whole other beast. It's when your old personality has left town and been replaced by a block of cement with black tar oozing through your veins and mind. This is when you can't decide whether to get a manicure or jump off a cliff. It's all the same. When I was institutionalised I sat on a chair unable to move for three months, frozen in fear. To take a

It's so common, it could be anyone. The trouble is, nobody wants to talk about it. And that makes everything worse.

You are not your illness. You have an individual story to tell. You have a name, a history, a personality. Staying yourself is part of the battle.

Having a child who is struggling doesn't make you a bad parent, just as being a child who is struggling doesn't make your child a bad kid.

You do not need to be temperamental or upset to be a novelist. Don’t embrace the tortured artist rhetoric that any life difficulties might serve to benefit and enhance your writing. That’s damaging. Counterintuitive. Writing can be so incredibly lonely, and when you’re alone with your thoughts for long enough to produce a hundred thousand words of your own headspace, it can be scary. Suffering is not good for your art. Mental health care is. So talk to someone other than your future readers abou

To not have your suffering recognized is an almost unbearable form of violence.

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

As special as it is to listen to your friends argue over whether or not you have a mental illness,I'm starting to get the urge to go back to class.

I have schizophrenia. I am not schizophrenia. I am not my mental illness. My illness is a part of me.

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

I hated these visits, because I kept feeling the visitors measuring my fat and stringy hair against what I had been and what they wanted me to be, and I knew they went away utterly confounded.

When you go into the psych ward, you can’t have anything with you except colored pencils. You can’t have any electronics. If you have a drawstring on your pants, a belt, shoelaces, a hood, or extra-long fabric, your very clothes are ripped off your back. They search you with a metal detector like you’re a criminal, doing everything short of putting their hand up your butt. Before you go through those cold, automatic, barred doors, you know your life is not your own. This is especially true durin

Brains are like toddlers. They are wonderful and should be treasured, but that doesn't mean you should trust them to take care of you in an avalanche or process serotonin effectively.

I think the stigma attached to mental illness will disappear just like it did for cancer years ago.

Been under treatment for PTSD and bipolar since 1992. I’m not ashamed of my illness. I’ve been shunned by many and I feel for those shunned, too.

When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive. We come back to life thinner, paler, weaker … but as survivors. Survivors who don’t get pats on the back from coworkers who congratulate them

Although stigmatizing attitudes are not limited to mental illness, the public seems to disapprove persons with psychiatric disabilities significantly more than persons with related conditions such as physical illness (34-36). 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 causing them (34,36). Furthermor

In 2006, there is no army of recovered memory therapists, and Dr McNally’s assumptions about patients with PTSD and those working in this field are troubling. Owing to past debates, those working in the PTSD field are perhaps more knowledgeable than others about malingered, factitious, and iatrogenic variants.Why, then, does Dr McNally attack PTSD as a valid diagnosis, demean those working in the field, and suggest that sufferers are mostly malingered or iatrogenic, while giving little or no con

Here I want to stress that perception of losing one’s mind is based on culturally derived and socially ingrained stereotypes as to the significance of symptoms such as hearing voices, losing temporal and spatial orientation, and sensing that one is being followed, and that many of the most spectacular and convincing of these symptoms in some instances psychiatrically signify merely a temporary emotional upset in a stressful situation, however terrifying to the person at the time. Similarly, the

You’re not fine. You’re not. And that’s OK. The first thing I want you to do is to finally tell yourself that it’s OK not to be OK. To accept that you’re feeling badly and that something isn’t right. Too many of us are in denial because we think that to admit there’s something wrong means we’re weak or broken or odd. I don’t know if it’s society, or just who we associate with, but we need to change our way of thinking. We are not weak. We are not broken. We are not odd.

Anxiety is the monster that resides within.

Although enlightened people know that an extreme phobia wasn't a form of madness, hey could not help but regard it as odd.

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 self. Stigma may differ from other elicitors of shame and guilt, in part because it is a social appearance factor. The degree to which the stigma is socially apparent is the degree to which one must negotiate the issue of blame, not only for one's self but between one's self and

Every time you feel like mocking a person you disagree with politically by implying that they are mentally ill, I want you to instead imagine you are talking to every single person who actually is mentally ill and telling them they are worthless. That's how it makes mentally ill people feel. Doesn't seem very progressive now does it?

They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.

Stigma against mental illness is a scourge with many faces, and the medical community wears a number of those faces.

To actually accept that you have an eating disorder or a mental health issue is actually a sign of great, great strength. It is not a sign of weakness at all.

While a psychiatric diagnosis can serve a purpose in treatment plans, it should not become a tool to discredit a person's disclosure of abuse.

The stigma of mental illness is first and foremost a social justice issue!

Self-stigma refers to the state in which a person with mental illness has come to internalize the negative attitudes about mental illness and turns them against him- or herself.

A panic attack is pathological exaggeration of the body’s normal response to fear, stress or excitement.

It’s hard to imagine a more squarely on-the-nose example of demonizing mental illness than portraying a mentally ill man as a literal demon.

Unfortunately, mental health is so misunderstood that some people think you have to be crazy to need to speak to a therapist.

Beautiful things have been broken before…

In talking with people that have experienced it, I learned that PTSD is something that a person in a position of authority sometimes thinks they’re not supposed to have. They don’t always have an avenue to personally address it or even discuss it.

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

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 illness.

I had people saying 'it's all in your head'. Do you honestly think I want to feel this way?

1 in 5 people have dandruff. 1 in 4 people have mental health problems. I've had both.

Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, but stigma and bias shame us all.

I'm not the kind of person who likes to shout out my personal issues from the rooftops, but with my bipolar becoming public, I hope fellow sufferers will know it's completely controllable. I hope I can help remove any stigma attached to it, and that those who don't have it under control will seek help with all that is available to treat it.

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.

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

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 causing them (34,36). Furthermore, research respondents are less likely to pity persons with mental illness, instead reacting to psychiatric disability with anger and believing that help is not deserved (35,36,39).Understanding the impact of stigma on people

Stigmas speak to the idea of difference and how difference shames us and those we know.

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

Public stigma Stereotype Negative belief about a group (e.g., dangerousness, incompetence, character weakness)Prejudice Agreement with belief and/or negative emotional reaction (e.g., anger, fear)Discrimination Behavior response to prejudice (e.g., avoidance, withhold employment and housing opportunities, withhold help)Self-stigma Stereotype Negative belief about the self (e.g., character weakness, incompetence)Prejudice Agreement with belief, negative emotional reaction (e.g., low self-esteem,

The process of reforming the mental health system never includes the complaints that families and caregivers have regarding a need for increased access to resources, treatment, education, and financial support. Reform has continued to ignore the basic needs of families and suffering individuals with severe mental illness and special needs.

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.

Too often the survivor is seen by [himself or] herself and others as "nuts," "crazy," or "weird." Unless her responses are understood within the context of trauma. A traumatic stress reaction consists of *natural* emotions and behaviors in response to a catastrophe, its immediate aftermath, or memories of it. These reactions can occur anytime after the trauma, even decades later. The coping strategies that victims use can be understood only within the context of the abuse of a child. The importa

Even though I know that breaking your brain is the same as breaking your arm, I'm still ashamed that my brain is broken.

To resist a compulsion with willpower alone is to hold back an avalanche by melting the snow with a candle. It just keeps coming and coming and coming.

Officially, it is no more possible to be a little bit OCD than it is to be a little bit pregnant or a little bit dead.

Despite the growing clinical and research interest in dissociative symptoms and disorders, it is also true that the substantial prevalence rates for dissociative disorders are still disproportional to the number of studies addressing these conditions. For example, schizophrenia has a reported rate of 0.55% to 1% of the normal population (Goldner, Hus, Waraich, & Somers, more or less similar to the prevalence of DID. Yet a PubMed search generated 25,421 papers on research related to schizophrenia