1,815 Quotes About Mental-illness

The best thing about rock bottom is the rock part. You discover the solid bit of you. The bit that can't be broken down further. The thing that you might sentimentally call a soul. At our lowest we find the solid ground of our foundation. And we can build ourselves anew.

It is okay to own a technology, what is not okay is to be owned by technology.

Even in my blackest depressions, I never regretted having been born. It is true that I had wanted to die, but that is peculiarly different from regretting having been born.

Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.

Of the many dreadful manifestations of the disease, both physical and psychological, a sense of self-hatred—or, put less categorically, a failure of self-esteem—is one of the most universally experienced symptoms, and I had suffered more and more from a general feeling of worthlessness as the malady had progressed.

But such wan cheer was an habitual pretense which I knew meant very little, for I was certain to feel ghastly before nightfall. I had come to a point where I was carefully monitoring each phase of my deteriorating condition.

I was feeling in my mind a sensation close to, but indescribably different from, actual pain.

(...) one of the most unendurable aspects of such an interlude was the inability to sleep (...) the disruption of normal sleep patterns is a notoriously devastating feature of depression (...). It had become clear that I would never be granted even a few minutes' relief from my full-time exhaustion.

My brother was philosophically impaired, emotionally paralysed and stubborn, but he was not mentally ill. Mental illness suggests some kind of biological maladjustment such as that caused by injury or drug-induced chemical imbalances, whereas my brother, like many male suicides I have known, reacted normally to an abnormal situation. My brother felt he could not show the suffering that revealed him as sensitive; to do so would have threatened his gender status. It was easier for him to die.