1,815 Quotes About Mental-illness

But the odds against me were getting higher each day. I, who was my own worst enemy, needed a best friend. I thought booze was my friend. I did not know I was in a fight—not just with my lawyers, not just with my husband, but also with my disease. I didn’t know I could not win this one on my own, that it would take years, and a change of mind and heart, to win the battle with an opponent I could not even see.

He wondered if he could ever make his ego light enough to relax in not having to settle the meaning of things. What would that feel like?

Our brains are embodied—much of the problem with the debate over addiction and psychiatry more generally is a refusal to accept this and our ongoing need to see “physical,” “neurological,” and “psychological” as completely distinct.

It is time to embrace mental health and substance use/abuse as illnesses. Addiction is a disease.

This will sound strange, and yet I'm sure it was the point: it was a bit like being high. That, for me, anyway, had always been the attraction of drugs, to stop the brutal round of hypercritical thinking, to escape the ravages of an unoccupied mind cannibalizing itself.

It was painful to contemplate the distance between the future of accomplishment I'd imagined for myself twenty years earlier...it was painful to understand that the cushion of exceptionality invoked by the drug had made me oblivious to my inertia. And it was painful to have to define myself again, at an age when most people are happy in their own skins.

If I was lonely, if I was afraid of being alone, then why abandon myself? Why run to someone else looking to give myself the thing that only I could give? I wanted to escape myself because I felt empty, and the emptiness frightened me. But obviously, I was empty because I was always running out, running away. The only way to fill the emptiness was to remain, to take up residence in myself.

The fear of the drugs running out is manageable-the fear of time running down isn’t.

No, that's where you are wrong. Your mind was full of sadness and darkness. That is a very different thing entirely. On earth it's nearly impossible to know it, but our minds are not at all who we are. Our brains are just an organ. When we died, our minds died too. All of this, all of what is to come, it's your soul. Our souls never die. They are the very root of who we are, not what we are, but who we are.