8 Quotes by Mark Lukach

I began to see her mind like an old television set, one with a dial you had to change the channels. She'd gotten stuck between channels and all that was broadcasting in her mind was crackling white noise which drove her mad and scared me to death. The medicine was like turning down the volume. The channles might still be stuck but at least the set was no longer spewing the deafening static. The volume had to be lowered until the channels could work again

I began to see her mind like an old television set, one with a dial you had to change the channels. She'd gotten stuck between channels and all that was broadcasting in her mind was crackling white noise which drove her mad and scared me to death. The medicine was like turning down the volume. The channels might still be stuck but at least the set was no longer spewing the deafening static. The volume had to be lowered until the channels could work again

I began to see her mind like an old television set, one with a dial you had to change the channels. She’d gotten stuck between channels and all that was broadcasting in her mind was crackling white noise which drove her mad and scared me to death. The medicine was like turning down the volume. The channles might still be stuck but at least the set was no longer spewing the deafening static. The volume had to be lowered until the channels could work again.

Families lose when people treat mental illness like it only impacts one person.

Giulia continued to fidget, but after a few minutes she calmed down and sat back on her beach chair. Psychosis waxes and wanes like the tides, and a passing jogger had triggered a fierce return of her disoriented, paranoid thinking. And then just as inexplicably, it faded away. The hospital hadn’t fixed anything. It had only stabilized her, and not even all the way.

In fact, maybe love, in the purest sense, is about being kind to someone with no expectation of how they’re going to respond. They can ignore your kindness, reject it, or return it tenfold, but you just continue to be kind, and that is love.

I realized then why people call suicide hotlines. The person on the other end of the line wasn’t a therapist, wasn’t going to prescribe medicine, wasn’t going to try to convince the caller to feel differently, wasn’t going to love the caller the way a family member would. The person on the other end of the line was going to listen without judgment or fear, an invaluable gift that the suicidal rarely receive.

Our small gestures were unromantic but felt even more important than romance, because they were our daily practice of showing each other that we cared.