Quotes about schizophrenia
Oscar Levant -
Schizophrenia beats dining alone.
Philip K. Dick -
Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but shou
Philip K. Dick -
If you think this Universe is bad, you should see some of the others.
Irvine Welsh - Filth
We wait and think and doubt and hate. How does it make you feel? The overwhelming feeling is rage. We hate ourself for being unable to be other than what we are. Unable to be better. We feel rage. The feelings must be followed. It doesn't matter whether you're an ideologue or a sensualist, you follow the stimuli thinking that they're your signposts to the promised land. But they are nothing of the kind. What they are is rocks to navigate the past, each on your brush against, ripping you a little
Nathan Filer -
This is what labels do. They stick. If people think you're MAD, then everything you do, everything you think, will have MAD stamped across it.
Nathan Filer - The Shock of the Fall
If I look closely I can see we have the same colour eyes, not me and Simon, but me and the boy who is also me, the boy who I can no longer recognise, with whom I no longer share a single thought, worry, or hope.
Thomas Harris - The Silence of the Lambs
Can you smell his sweat? That peculiar goatish odor is trans-3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid. Remember it, it's the smell of schizophrenia.
Elyn R. Saks - The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness
My good fortune is not that I've recovered from mental illness. I have not, nor will I ever. My good fortune lies in having found my life.
Ernest Becker - The Denial of Death
Too much possibility is the attempt by the person to overvalue the powers of the symbolic self. It reflects the attempt to exaggerate one half of the human dualism at the expense of the other. In this sense, what we call schizophrenia is an attempt by the symbolic self to deny the limitations of the finite body; in doing so, the entire person is pulled off balance and destroyed. It is as though the freedom of creativity that stems from within the symbolic self cannot be contained by the body, an
Jonathan Harnisch - Jonathan Harnisch: An Alibiography
Thoughts. Thoughts bombard my head, my brain. My psyche
Julia Walton - Words on Bathroom Walls
It's a very strange reality when you can't trust yourself. There's no foundation for anything. The faith I might have had in normal things like gravity or logic or love is gone because my mind might not be reading them correctly. You can't possibly know what it means to doubt everything. To walk into a room full of people and pretend that it's empty because you're not actually sure if it is or not.To never feel completely alone even when you are.
Francesca Zappia - Made You Up
Sometimes I think people take reality for granted.
Allie Burke - Paper Souls
Now, Emily didn't make a sound. There was something more defining about the soundless reality that condemned the paradigm of passion.
Bhanu Kapil -
It is psychotic to draw a line between two places.It is psychotic to go.It is psychotic to look.Psychotic to live in a different country forever.Psychotic to lose something forever.The compelling conviction that something has been lost is psychotic.Even the aeroplane's dotted line on the monitor as it descends to Heathrow is purely weird ambient energy.It is psychotic to submit to violence in a time of great violence and yet it is psychotic to leave that home or country, the place where you subm
Nathan Filer -
I said that my mother is mad. I said that. But you might not see it. I mean, you might not think that anything I've told you proves she is mad. But there are different kinds of madness. Some madness doesn't act mad to begin with, sometimes it will knock politely at the door, and when you let it in, it'll simply sit in the corner without a fuss - and grow. Then one day, maybe many months after your decision to take your son out of school and isolate him in a house for reasons that got lost in you
James S.A. Corey - Cibola Burn
The margins of the space were bright without illuminating anything or casting shadows, sharp and terrible. It reminded her of the way schizophrenics and people suffering migraines would describe light as assaulting and dangerous.
Allie Burke - Paper Souls
The sound of her phone shocked her out of the dark world that was currently playing in front of her eyes from the book in her lap. She wondered sometimes, why she bothered with books. If she wanted to hallucinate, all she had to do was get up in the morning.
Faiz Shaikh -
They say I don’t exist. They say I am an extension, an indulgence, imagination of a schizophrenic person.
Terence McKenna -
Schizophrenia is just a catch-all term for forms of mental behaviour that we don’t understand. In the nineteenth century there was a term, melancholia, which we would now call bipolar depression… but all forms of sadness, unhappiness, maladaptation, were poured into this label melancholia… Now, schizophrenia is a similar thing… A book about schizophrenia [says that] the typical schizophrenic lives in a world of twilight imagining. Marginal to his society, incapable of holding a regular job, thes
Michaela Haze - The Bleeders
When had I stopped being a person with Paranoid Schizophrenia, and become a Paranoid Schizophrenic; defined by my illness?
Denice Envall -
Even as a child the glimpse of what a normal life would have been was always beyond my vision and my grasp. No matter what I glimpsed - whether hope or warning, happiness or sadness - it all led to the same present, to me being numb.I have been formed by the events of my life and the people involved. The loss of my innocence; the watchful, paranoid eye of my mother; the rejection of the adults around me; my abusive ex-boyfriend; the ignorance of my peers; I’ve allowed all of them to shape me int
Allie Burke - Paper Souls
What to do with life? Get out of bed, Derek. That’s what you do. You get out of bed, and you get yourself a cup of fucking coffee. That’s all you can do.
Jonathan Harnisch - Jonathan Harnisch: An Alibiography
No, Ben. What I’m asking is: Are you the vehicle, and Georgie rides around in you? That is why Ben’s the driver, right?
R. D. Laing -
What we call 'normal' is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience.
Ross David Burke - When the Music's Over: My Journey into Schizophrenia
Am I a mindless fool? My life is a fragment, a disconnected dream that has no continuity. I am so tired of senselessness. I am tired of the music that my feelings sing, the dream music.
Lailah Gifty Akita -
As I explored my soul, now I know I have survived schizophrenia; hearing voices, reduced social engagement, emotional expression and lack of motivation.
Sylvia Nasar -
Store speculates:Some creative people… of predominantly schizoid or depressive temperaments... use their creative capacities in a defensive way. If creative work protects a man from mental illness, it is a small wonder that he pursues it with avidity. The schizoid state... Is characterized by a sense of meaninglessness and futility. For most people, interaction with others provides most of what they require to find meaning and significance in life. For the schizoid person, however, this is not t
Nic Sheff - Schizo
You have got to get creative if you want anyone to notice your goddamn teenage angst.
Nic Sheff - Schizo
Maybe having schizophrenia is my big fuck-you to the status quo. Only, I guess at this point, being normal and well-adjusted would be, like, the biggest fuck-you of them all. So I guess I'll just try to shoot for that, if I can.
Thomas Szaz -
If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic
Emilie Autumn -
Oh, and I certainly don't suffer from schizophrenia. I quite enjoy it. And so do I.
Jung Chang - Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
At night I locked my bedroom door, because [my father] could not sleep and would insist on talking to me, endlessly, without making sense. But there was a small window over the door which could not be locked. One night I woke up to see him slithering through the tiny aperture and jumping nimbly to the floor. But he paid no attention to me. He aimlessly picked up various pieces of heavy mahogany furniture and let them drop with seemingly little effort. In his insanity he had become superhumanly a
Joseph Campbell - Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research
The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.
Joseph Campbell - Myths to Live By
The LSD phenomenon, on the other hand, is—to me at least—more interesting. It is an intentionally achieved schizophrenia, with the expectation of a spontaneous remission—which, however, does not always follow. Yoga, too, is intentional schizophrenia: one breaks away from the world, plunging inward, and the ranges of vision experienced are in fact the same as those of a psychosis. But what, then, is the difference? What is the difference between a psychotic or LSD experience and a yogic, or a mys
Susannah Cahalan - Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness
In the spring of 2009, I was the 217th person ever to be diagnosed with anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis. Just a year later, that figure had doubled. Now the number is in the thousands. Yet Dr. Bailey, considered one of the best neurologists in the country, had never heard of it. When we live in a time when the rate of misdiagnoses has shown no improvement since the 1930s, the lesson here is that it’s important to always get a second opinion.While he may be an excellent doctor in many
John Forbes Nash - Jr.
There are things that tend to moderate with age. Schizophrenia is somewhat like that.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The Double
Beside himself with shame and despair, the utterly ruined though perfectly just Mr. Golyadkin dashed headlong away, wherever fate might lead him; but with every step he took, with every thud of his foot on the granite of the pavement, there leapt up as though out of the earth a Mr. Golyadkin precisely the same, perfectly alike, and of a revolting depravity of heart. And all these precisely similar Golyadkins set to running after one another as soon as they appeared, and stretched in a long chain
Jonathan Harnisch - and Schizophrenia
What if you had such severe schizophrenia that your life was just one hallucination after another? And what if people kept trying to drag you back out of those hallucinations, to prove that you weren't living in reality and that reality was nothing more than a psych hospital? Would you go?
أحمد عمارة -
Kiss me twice, I am schizophrenic .. Kiss me ten times, I am obsessive!
Allie Burke - Paper Souls
Emily woke to shadows and their voices. They looked different today, because the entire world hurt. The numbness had worn off sometime between sleep and awake, and she was seeing red. The shadows on the walls were not shadows at all, but red blobs consisting of teeth and claws. Her house reeked of pain.The whole world was fucking bleeding.
R.D. Laing -
Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.
Francesca Zappia - Made You Up
Believing something existed and then finding out it didn't was like reaching the top of the stairs and thinking there was one more step.
Francesca Zappia - Made You Up
I didn't have the luxury of taking reality for granted. And I wouldn't say I hated people who did, because that's just about everyone. I didn't hate them. They didn't live in my world. But that never stopped me from wishing I lived in theirs.
Kelley Armstrong - The Summoning
Schizo. It didn't matter how many times Dr. Gill compared it to a disease or physical disability, it wasn't the same thing. It just wasn't. I had schizophrenia. If I saw two guys on the sidewalk, one in a wheelchair and one talking talking to himself, which would I rush to open a door for, and which would I cross the road to avoid?
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - Breakfast of Champions
This is a very bad book you’re writing,” I said to myself behind my leaks. “I know,” I said. “You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your mother did,” I said. “I know,” I said. There in the cocktail lounge, peering out through my leaks at a world of my own invention, I mouthed this word: schizophrenia. The sound and appearance of the word had fascinated me for many years. It sounded and looked to me like a human being sneezing in a blizzard of soapflakes.
Elyn R. Saks -
There’s a tremendous need to implode the myths of mental illness, to put a face on it, to show people that a diagnosis does not have to lead to a painful and oblique life....We who struggle with these disorders can lead full, happy, productive lives, if we have the right resources.
Francesca Zappia - Made You Up
I was a schizophrenic, not a damn invalid.
MR Leif N Gregersen II -
The measure of a man, or a woman for that matter, is not so much how much they have done, but what they have overcome to do what they have done. My favorite poets have said:"Do not go gentle into that good night!"-Dylan Thomas"...fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance ran..."-Rudyard Kipling
Neel Burton - The Meaning of Madness
If two people with no symptoms in common can both receive the same diagnosis of schizophrenia, then what is the value of that label in describing their symptoms, deciding their treatment, or predicting their outcome, and would it not be more useful simply to describe their problems as they actually are? And if schizophrenia does not exist in nature, then how can researchers possibly find its cause or correlates? If psychiatric research has made so little progress in recent decades, it is in larg
Patrick W. Corrigan -
the stigma of severe mental illness leads to prejudice and discrimination. Stigmas are negative and erroneous attitudes about these persons. Unfortunately, stigma's impact on a person's life may be as harmful as the direct effects of the disease.Corrigan, P. W., & Penn, D. L. (1999). Lessons from social psychology on discrediting psychiatric stigma. American Psychologist, 54(9), 765–776.
Allan Dare Pearce - Hitler Burns Detroit
Schizophrenia. Always a bitch.
Allie Burke - Paper Souls
Life wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t supposed to be. Eternal beauty could not exist if it were not for the face of a fatal flaw.
Thomas Szasz - The Second Sin
Psychiatrists look for twisted molecules and defective genes as the causes of schizophrenia, because schizophrenia is the name of a disease. If Christianity or Communism were called diseases, would they then look for the chemical and genetic “causes” of these “conditions”?
George Orwell -
in our age there is no such thing as " keeping out of politics " all issues are political issues , and politics itself is a mass of lies , evasions , folly , hatred and .
Mira Bartok - The Memory Palace
We children of schizophrenics are the great secret keepers, the ones who don't want you to think that anything is wrong.
Louis Sachar -
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 ideas, floating free.
Benjamin Aubrey Myers -
I am alone, but never lonely. I am lonely, but never alone.
Lailah Gifty Akita -
I survived schizophrenia.
Lailah Gifty Akita -
The medication given during mental-ill health makes you rather weaker in body, in soul and in spirit.