Mentally Ill Quotes

It is only too true that a lot of artists are mentally ill - it's a life which, to put it mildly, makes one an outsider. I'm all right when I completely immerse myself in work, but I'll always remain half crazy.

You don't tell someone who's mentally ill or struggling, who's having a low time in their lives, to harden up, because it doesn't work.

Mental illness leaves a huge legacy, not just for the person suffering it but for those around them.

America is in a runaway-train position and dragging all the world with it. It's grotesquely mentally ill.

Well, many insane people and seriously mentally ill people seem very reasonable.

I'm either mentally ill or Jewish. I can't sometimes tell the difference.

When I said that the mentally ill should be in institutions, public universities weren't the kind of institutions I had in mind.

15 Step is about how if you have mental illness and try to dance you look very funny. Whenever you see me dancing on stage, I'm imitating the mentally ill.

It is now no mystery that some quite influential 'philosophers' were 'mentally' ill.

Dead kids are put on pedestals, but mentally ill kids get hidden under the rug.

I think that I'm so psychotic and so mentally ill that if I could tap into that I could do something really interesting.

The difference between a healthy person and one who is mentally ill is the fact that the healthy one has all the mentall illnesses, and the mentally ill person has only one.

Jane Gallagher had wanted to know what time it was, but for some reason Holden Caulfield hadn't wanted Stradlater to tell her. When Stradlater refused to tell Holden Caulfield whether or not he had told Jane Gallagher what time it was, Holden Caulfield became enraged and attacked him in a fit or horological savagery, possibly because he was mentally ill and hated anyone byt him knowing what time it was.

[It] is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.

The dumping of the mentally ill, full of these new psychiatric drugs, into the streets is a scandal. It's been carried furthest in New York, where whole sections of the decayed Upper West Side are being filled with pensioners and psychotic patients on stelazine, lithium carbonate, and everything else under the sun. They can't diagnose the patient, so they give him the whole psychiatric pharmacopoeia at once, and he walks around in a psychotic trance beautifully painted all over with petrochemicals.

I’m going to be mentally ill in fifteen years, and that’s why my husband doesn’t want to be around me.

It sounded weird to hear you talk so much; normally you only said a few words at a time. I'd never imagined that you'd have a story, too. Until that moment, you were just the kidnapper. You didn't have reasons for anything. You were stupid and evil and mentally ill. That was all. When you started talking, you started changing.

There's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill and we're all haunted by something, and some people manage to find a way to ride it out so that they don't wind up needing extra help. So I think that "mental illness," as a term, is garbage. Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something.

There was however, a group of 507 individuals who were permanent street dwellers [in Miami.] These 507 were not indigent, down-on-their-luck families. They were single people and every one of them was mentally ill.

Do not proffer sympathy to the mentally ill; it is a bottomless pit. Tell them firmly, "I am not paid to listen to this drivel - you are a terminal fool!" Otherwise, they make you as crazy as they are.

Diagnoses exist to help get people services they need - but there's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill.

Labeling a child as mentally ill is stigmatization, not diagnosis. Giving a child a psychiatric drug is poisoning, not treatment.

For decades now, [Fuller] Torrey has been warning America what would happen if the dangerously mentally ill were deinstitutionalized, and it's all come true. Today, the only place we can put mental patients is on MSNBC.

I don't meet many people that are evil. I meet human beings who are flawed, who are mentally ill and have enormous problems, but I don't think I've ever met someone who was a totally dark energy that had no humanity or sense of love or affection for anything in their life. That's very rare.

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you.

How many more copycats are waiting in the wings for their moment of fame — from a national media machine that rewards them with the wall-to-wall attention and sense of identity that they crave — while provoking others to try to make their mark? A dozen more killers? A hundred? More? How can we possibly even guess how many, given our nation's refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill?

They believe that if they do get published, a wonderful new life is in store. It will turn out that deep down they are really valuable people and will have lots of money from now on and really cool people like Ethan Hawke will be dropping by all the time. But it's a lie. Being a published writer will make them long to be ONLY as mentally ill as they are now. Their current level of obsession and doubt and self-loathing will look like the good old days. Honest.

We have to enforce the laws we've already got, make sure that we're keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, those who are mentally ill. I also share your belief that weapons that were designed for soldiers in war theaters don't belong on our streets. And so what I'm trying to do is to get a broader conversation about how do we reduce the violence generally.

The diagnosis of homosexuality as a "disorder" is a contributing factor to the pathology of those homosexuals who do become mentally ill.... Nothing is more likely to make you sick than being constantly told that you are sick.

In America it is not considered to be mentally ill when a woman advances on her prey in a discotheque setting with hardy cocktails present.

Here's the thing: If you're so far left you actually believe that somebody owes you a job, citizenship and a heart transplant, you're mentally ill. If you're so far right that you actually believe that somebody who doesn't have a job and is not a citizen deserves to have their heart cut out and sold on eBay, and you get to keep 80 percent of the profit - you're mentally ill.

May the state fence in the harmless mentally ill solely to save its citizens from exposure to those whose ways are different? One might as well ask if the state, to avoid public unease, could incarcerate all who are physically unattractive or socially eccentric.

Those who become mentally ill often have a history of chronic pain.

Psychiatrists say that 1 of 4 people are mentally ill. Check 3 friends. If they are okay, you're 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.

The guilt I felt for having a mental illness was horrible. I prayed for a broken bone that would heal in six weeks. But that never happened. I was cursed with an illness that nobody could see and nobody knew much about.

All I can say is, it's a sort of kinship, as though there is a family tree of grief. On this branch, the lost children, on this the suicided parents, here the beloved mentally ill siblings. When something terrible happens, you discover all of the sudden that you have a new set of relatives, people with whom you can speak in the shorthand of cousins.

Mentally ill people come from all belief systems.

I'm going to be 58, and I'm a woman. In this business, that seems to be a bigger crime than being mentally ill

No one ever questions the disorder behind her tarantula LA glamour – sociopathy, narcissism – because it’s good rock and roll, good entertainment! I have a low tolerance for manipulative, egomaniacal behaviour, and usually have to remind myself that the person might be mentally ill.

I think you get mentally ill being homeless. Most of the bag ladies wind up mentally ill pretty quickly - what people would call paranoid - because they are in such danger. I don't know if it's really paranoia because they are in great danger. Terrible things happen to them, and they lose everything. How could they not become at the very least severely depressed?

What do prisoners do? Write, of course; even if they have to use blood as ink, as the Marquis de Sade did. The reasons they write, the exquisitely frustrating restrictions of their autonomy and the fact that no one listens to their cries, are all the reasons that mentally ill people, and even many normal people write. We write to escape our prisons.

I think that we're all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better - and maybe not all that much better after all.

I have seen the cycle of a non-violent, mentally ill offender who is arrested repeatedly and put into the system repeatedly-never being treated for his illness and, as a result, becoming more and more ill.

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 ankle, 'This isn't me! This is not who I am!

My new catchphrase is: 'Pull yourself together.' I've done the inner child, I've had analysis, I've decided that unless you're mentally ill and need support, it's up to you.

You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded.

Prison is quite literally a ghetto in the most classic sense of the word, a place where the U.S. government now puts not only the dangerous but also the inconvenient—people who are mentally ill, people who are addicts, people who are poor and uneducated and unskilled. Meanwhile the ghetto in the outside world is a prison as well, and a much more difficult one to escape from than this correctional compound. In fact, there is basically a revolving door between our urban and rural ghettos and the formal ghetto of our prison system.

If there was acceptance of the mentally ill in the Catholic Church, the entire Curia would resign!

People say to the mentally ill, ‘You know so many people think the world of you.’ But when they don’t like themselves they don’t notice anything. They don’t care about what people think of them. When you hate yourself, whatever people say it doesn’t make sense. ‘Why do they like me? Why do they care about me?’ Because you don’t care about yourself at all.