“I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always,
forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the
background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave,
but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the
kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will
remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the
photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one
who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at the picture again, I
want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from
history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that
goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible...”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
“There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-- you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind
“A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.”
― Guy de Maupassant, Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques
“When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life
“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
“I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
“I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been midly manic. When I am my present "normal" self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In sort, for myself, I am a hard act to follow.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind
“To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.”
― Jeanette Winterson
“I'm so good at beginnings, but in the end I always seem to destroy everything, including myself.”
― Kiera Van Gelder, The Buddha and the Borderline: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder through Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Buddhism, and Online Dating
“People with BPD are like people with third degree burns over 90% of their bodies. Lacking emotional skin, they feel agony at the slightest touch or movement.”
― Marsha M. Linehan
“You survived by seizing every tiny drop of love you could find anywhere, and milking it, relishing it, for all it was worth. And as you grew up, you sought love, anywhere you could find it, whether it was a teacher or a coach or a friend or a friend's parents. You sought those tiny droplets of love, basking in them when you found them. They sustained you. For all these years, you've lived under the illusion that somehow, you made it because you were tough enough to overpower the abuse, the hatred, the hard knocks of life. But really you made it because love is so powerful that tiny little doses of it are enough to overcome the pain of the worst things life can dish out. Toughness was a faulty coping mechanism you devised to get by. But, in reality, it has been your ability to never give up, to keep seeking love, and your resourcefulness to make that love last long enough to sustain you. That is what has gotten you by.”
― Rachel Reiland, Get Me Out of Here: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder
“They love without measure those whom they will soon hate without reason.”
― Thomas Sydenham, The Whole Works of That Excellent Practical Physician, Dr. Thomas Sydenham: Wherein Not Only the History and Cures of Acute Diseases Are Treated of th
“To stave off the panic associated with the absence of a primary object, borderline patients frequently will impulsively engage in behaviors that numb the panic and establish contact with and control over some new object.”
― Christine Ann Lawson, Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship
“A crucial element of the real self is its unconditional acceptance of itself.”
― Michael Adzema
“The role of the therapist is to reflect the being/accepting self that was never allowed to be in the borderline.”
― Michael Adzema
“The theologian Paul Tillich wrote that "loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude." Because the borderline finds solitude so difficult to tolerate, she is trapped in a relentless metaphysical loneliness from which the the only relief comes from of the physical presence of others. So she will often rush to singles bars or with crowded haunts, often with disappointing--or even violent--results.”
― Jerold J. Kreisman, I Hate You, Don't Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality
“The charges of borderline personality disorder are the same charges against girls writing literature, I realize—too emotional, too impulsive, no boundaries.”
― Kate Zambreno
“The borderline Queen experiences what therapists call "oral greediness". The desperate hunger of the borderline Queen is akin to the behavior of an infant who had gone too long between feelings. Starved, frustrated, and beyond the ability to calm of soothe herself, she grabs, flails, and wails until at last the nipple is planted securely and perhaps too deeply in her mouth. She coughs, gags, chokes, and spits, eyeing the elusive breast like a wolf guarding her food. Similarity, the Queen holds on to what is hers, taking more than she could use, in case it might be taken away prematurely.”
― Christine Ann Lawson, Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship
I can honestly say that my misery had been transformed into common unhappiness, so by Freud's definition I have achieved mental health.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted
“The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
“Suicide is a form of murder— premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes some getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.
It’s important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there’s a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there’s a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there’s a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance.
The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark—why not kill myself? Missed the bus—better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie—maybe I shouldn’t kill myself.
In reality, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.”
― Susanna Kaysen
“That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”
― Erich Fromm, The Sane Society
“Our society tends to regard as a sickness any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system and this is plausible because when an individual doesn't fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a cure for a sickness and therefore as good.”
― Theodore Kaczynski
“Alcohol ruined me financially and morally, broke my heart and the hearts of too many others. Even though it did this to me and it almost killed me and I haven't touched a drop of it in seventeen years, sometimes I wonder if I could get away with drinking some now. I totally subscribe to the notion that alcoholism is a mental illness because thinking like that is clearly insane.”
― Craig Ferguson, American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot
“I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds.”
― Hugo Wolf
“He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it's because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself. What looked like gentle contours from a distance were in fact sheer cliffs. Sometimes only a little of him was crazy, sometimes nearly all of him, but, as an adult, he was never entirely not crazy. What he'd seen of his id while trying to escape his island prison by way of drugs and alcohol, only to find himself even more imprisoned by addiction, seems never to have ceased to be corrosive of his belief in his lovability. Even after he got clean, even decades after his late-adolescent suicide attempt, even after his slow and heroic construction of a life for himself, he felt undeserving. And this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer, finally, than love.”
― Jonathan Franzen
“If you trade your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, and inexplicable grief.”
― Brené Brown
“But money spent while manic doesn't fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you're given excellent reason to be even more so.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind
“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.”
― Ross David Burke, When the Music's Over: My Journey into Schizophrenia
“Between 10 and 20 percent of people with anorexia die from heart attacks, other complications and suicide; the disease has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. Or Kitty could have lost her life in a different way, lost it to the roller coaster of relapse and recovery, inpatient and outpatient, that eats up, on average, five to seven years. Or a lifetime: only half of all anorexics recovery in the end. The other half endure lives of dysfunction and despair. Friends and families give up on them. Doctors dread treating them. They’re left to stand in the bakery with the voice ringing in their ears, alone in every way that matters.”
― Harriet Brown
“Isolated, she managed somehow to feel free—albeit with a freedom that made her want to smash a hole in the very center of the universe.”
― Flora Rheta Schreiber, Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities
“the intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness if my mind's flight made it very difficult for me to believe once i was better, that the illness was one i should willingly give up....moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable reactions to what life has dealt....even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison
“Bipolar robs you of that which is you. It can take from you the very core of your being and replace it with something that is completely opposite of who and what you truly are. Because my bipolar went untreated for so long, I spent many years looking in the mirror and seeing a person I did not recognize or understand. Not only did bipolar rob me of my sanity, but it robbed me of my ability to see beyond the space it dictated me to look. I no longer could tell reality from fantasy, and I walked in a world no longer my own.”
― Alyssa Reyans, Letters from a Bipolar Mother
“Except you cannot outrun insanity, anymore than you can outrun your own shadow.”
― Alyssa Reyans, Letters from a Bipolar Mother
“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.”
― Richey Edwards
“Basically, all women are nurturers and healers, and all men are mental patients to varying degrees.”
― Nelson DeMille, The General's Daughter
“The doctor’s words made me understand what happened to me was a dark, evil, and shameful secret, and by association I too was dark, evil, and shameful. While it may not have been their intention, this was the message my clouded mind received. To escape the confines of the hospital, I once again disassociated myself from my emotions and numbed myself to the pain ravaging my body and mind. I acted as if nothing was wrong and went back to performing the necessary motions to get me from one day to the next. I existed but I did not live.”
― Alyssa Reyans, Letters from a Bipolar Mother
“If only his mind were as easy to fix as his body.”
― Han Nolan, Crazy
“It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis,' or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS
Psychosis can happen out of the blue, to anyone, and no one knows why. Not even the best doctors on the planet.
And that’s why Mom is always so afraid. If we don’t know what made me sick in the first place, how can anyone guarantee I won’t flip out again?”
― Jeannine Garsee, The Unquiet
“I’ve never had anorexia, but I know it well. I see it on the street, in the gaunt and sunken face, the boney chest, the spindly arms of an emaciated woman. I’ve come to recognize the flat look of despair, the hopelessness that follows, inevitably, from years of starvation. I think: That could have been [me]. It wasn’t. It’s not.”
― Harriet Brown, Brave Girl Eating: A Family's Struggle with Anorexia
The inability to correctly perceive reality is often responsible for humans' insane behavior. And every time they substitute an all-purpose, sloppy slang word for the words that would accurately describe an emotion or a situation, it lowers their reality orientations, pushes them farther from shore, out onto the foggy waters of alienation and confusion.'
― Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
“He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human
“They're the perfect loving fam'ly, so adoring...
And I love them ev'ry day of ev'ry week.
So my son's a little shit, my husband's boring,
And my daughter, though a genius, is a freak.”
― Brian Yorkey, Next to Normal
“When we asked him to sum up his impression of the girls' emotional state at that point, he said, "Buffeted but not broken.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
“The acknowledgement of having suffered evil is the greatest step forward in mental health.”
― Stefan Molyneux
“After my first few tastes I was pretty much hooked. I'd have dry spells, months without any or only piddling amounts of grace, but I never forgot about it or stopped wanting it.”
― Mark Vonnegut, The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity
“I woke from a nightmare to find I had never fallen asleep”
― K.Marie Stewart
“Sometimes it's in the deepest of despair that we find the knowledge we strive for”
― K.Marie Stewart
“It is in my head! That's why it's called Mental Illness.”
― Roni Askey-Doran, I'm Bipolar And I Know It
“If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind
“Many so-called disorders of the mind are simply disorders of thought.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Love Mindset
“My sadness is beautiful. It infuses everything I do. It is at the core of my identity and always has been, just as happiness is in some people. I refuse to be told that it's a flaw. I will not mute it with medications for the sake of society. I will hold it close to me and celebrate it rightfully while the rest of the world fails to see it for what it is and it will be their loss.”
― Ashly Lorenzana
“Creativity is closely associated with bipolar disorder. This condition is unique . Many famous historical figures and artists have had this. Yet they have led a full life and contributed so much to the society and world at large. See, you have a gift. People with bipolar disorder are very very sensitive. Much more than ordinary people. They are able to experience emotions in a very deep and intense way. It gives them a very different perspective of the world. It is not that they lose touch with reality. But the feelings of extreme intensity are manifested in creative things. They pour their emotions into either writing or whatever field they have chosen" (pg 181)”
― Preeti Shenoy, Life is What You Make It
“What if talking about your feelings doesn't fix anything? What if what you really need is to make the feelings go away?”
― Amy Reed, Crazy
“A vivid Imagination is awesome a Manic Imagination is a curse.”
― Stanley Victor Paskavich
“Since I am suffering with type 2 bipolar disorder mainly on the depressive side of the bipolar disorder.
I am not afraid nor am I disappointed with it; if this is what God Almighty want me to have; I will make sure that I will make good use of this disorder; and, be the best person that I can be.”
― Temitope Owosela
“Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me's is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind
“Bipolar illness, manic depression, manic-depressive illness, manic-depressive psychosis. That’s a nice way of saying you will feel so high that no street drug can compete and you will feel so low that you wish you had been hit by a Mack truck instead.”
― Christine F. Anderson, Forever Different: A Memoir of One Woman's Journey Living with Bipolar Disorder
“But new love only lasts so long, and then you crash back into the real people you are, and from as high as we were, it's a very long fall, and we hit the ground with a thud.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life
“At first it's bliss. It's drunken, heady, intoxicating. It swallows the people we were - not particuarly wonderful people, but people who did our best, more or less - and spits out the monsters we are becoming.
Our friends despise us. We are an epic. Everything is grand, crashing, brilliant, blinding. It's the Golden Age of Hollywood, and we are a legend in our own minds, and no one outside can fail to see that we are headed for hell, and we won't listen, we say they don't understand, we pour more wine, go to the parties, we sparkle, fly all over the country, we're on an adventure, unstoppable, we've found each other and we race through our days like Mr. Toad in his yellow motorcar, with no idea where the brakes are and to hell with it anyway, we are on fire, drunk with something we call love.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life
“In the terms of 'Mental Illness' Isn't stable a place they put horses that wish to run free?”
― Stanley Victor Paskavich
Never give up on someone with a mental illness. When "I" is replaced by "We", illness becomes wellness.”
― Shannon L. Alder
“You will always fail when there is an absence of actions”
― K.Marie Stewart
while we strive for self knowledge in the depths of our psyche we seem to only find more questions then answers”
― K.Marie Stewart
“Sorrow is like that morning breeze that never really leave”
― K.Marie Stewart
“the longer we wear the mask the hard it is to take off”
― K.Marie Stewart
“Sound of Death
Lips are blue, skin a pale grey
I hear no words, I speak no sound
There's no warmth where I lay
My chest is still, my pulse now warn
I see the stars as light fades before the dawn
I weightlessly walk the morning frost as I see all that I had once lost”
― K.Marie Stewart
“I hope that you can always find something to smile about no matter how hard life gets”
― K.Marie Stewart
“How long until we will be free from our minds mercy”
― K.Marie Stewart
“All Just Puppets
Hands are tied, feet are bound
Trying to scream but cant make a sound
Slave to strings and the hand of man
No feeling no more, fading away like a forgotten war
Help me now and cut me free before I drown in this darkened sea.”
― K.Marie Stewart
“We can find our demons and darkness in any place, any dream or thought but when we realize we don't need to face it alone life can become a lot easier.”
― K.Marie Stewart
“See the bright sun young child, feel the warmth on your face, see the rain falling down as it dances along the ground, see life for what it is before we grow to old, our sight becomes dull and frowns grow where smiles once rang so play now young one before time runs short.”
― K.Marie Stewart
“A void of Sounds from the distant past, a ghost which haunts my mind, with Raging currents which will leave us blind”
― K.Marie Stewart
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
“There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-- you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind
“A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.”
― Guy de Maupassant, Le Horla et autres contes fantastiques
“When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life
“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
“I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.”
― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye
“I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been midly manic. When I am my present "normal" self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In sort, for myself, I am a hard act to follow.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind
“To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.”
― Jeanette Winterson
“I'm so good at beginnings, but in the end I always seem to destroy everything, including myself.”
― Kiera Van Gelder, The Buddha and the Borderline: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder through Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Buddhism, and Online Dating
“People with BPD are like people with third degree burns over 90% of their bodies. Lacking emotional skin, they feel agony at the slightest touch or movement.”
― Marsha M. Linehan
“You survived by seizing every tiny drop of love you could find anywhere, and milking it, relishing it, for all it was worth. And as you grew up, you sought love, anywhere you could find it, whether it was a teacher or a coach or a friend or a friend's parents. You sought those tiny droplets of love, basking in them when you found them. They sustained you. For all these years, you've lived under the illusion that somehow, you made it because you were tough enough to overpower the abuse, the hatred, the hard knocks of life. But really you made it because love is so powerful that tiny little doses of it are enough to overcome the pain of the worst things life can dish out. Toughness was a faulty coping mechanism you devised to get by. But, in reality, it has been your ability to never give up, to keep seeking love, and your resourcefulness to make that love last long enough to sustain you. That is what has gotten you by.”
― Rachel Reiland, Get Me Out of Here: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder
“They love without measure those whom they will soon hate without reason.”
― Thomas Sydenham, The Whole Works of That Excellent Practical Physician, Dr. Thomas Sydenham: Wherein Not Only the History and Cures of Acute Diseases Are Treated of th
“To stave off the panic associated with the absence of a primary object, borderline patients frequently will impulsively engage in behaviors that numb the panic and establish contact with and control over some new object.”
― Christine Ann Lawson, Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship
“A crucial element of the real self is its unconditional acceptance of itself.”
― Michael Adzema
“The role of the therapist is to reflect the being/accepting self that was never allowed to be in the borderline.”
― Michael Adzema
“The theologian Paul Tillich wrote that "loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude." Because the borderline finds solitude so difficult to tolerate, she is trapped in a relentless metaphysical loneliness from which the the only relief comes from of the physical presence of others. So she will often rush to singles bars or with crowded haunts, often with disappointing--or even violent--results.”
― Jerold J. Kreisman, I Hate You, Don't Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality
“The charges of borderline personality disorder are the same charges against girls writing literature, I realize—too emotional, too impulsive, no boundaries.”
― Kate Zambreno
“The borderline Queen experiences what therapists call "oral greediness". The desperate hunger of the borderline Queen is akin to the behavior of an infant who had gone too long between feelings. Starved, frustrated, and beyond the ability to calm of soothe herself, she grabs, flails, and wails until at last the nipple is planted securely and perhaps too deeply in her mouth. She coughs, gags, chokes, and spits, eyeing the elusive breast like a wolf guarding her food. Similarity, the Queen holds on to what is hers, taking more than she could use, in case it might be taken away prematurely.”
― Christine Ann Lawson, Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship
I can honestly say that my misery had been transformed into common unhappiness, so by Freud's definition I have achieved mental health.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted
“The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
“Suicide is a form of murder— premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes some getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind.
It’s important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there’s a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there’s a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there’s a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance.
The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark—why not kill myself? Missed the bus—better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie—maybe I shouldn’t kill myself.
In reality, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.”
― Susanna Kaysen
“That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”
― Erich Fromm, The Sane Society
“Our society tends to regard as a sickness any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system and this is plausible because when an individual doesn't fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a cure for a sickness and therefore as good.”
― Theodore Kaczynski
“Alcohol ruined me financially and morally, broke my heart and the hearts of too many others. Even though it did this to me and it almost killed me and I haven't touched a drop of it in seventeen years, sometimes I wonder if I could get away with drinking some now. I totally subscribe to the notion that alcoholism is a mental illness because thinking like that is clearly insane.”
― Craig Ferguson, American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot
“I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds.”
― Hugo Wolf
“He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it's because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself. What looked like gentle contours from a distance were in fact sheer cliffs. Sometimes only a little of him was crazy, sometimes nearly all of him, but, as an adult, he was never entirely not crazy. What he'd seen of his id while trying to escape his island prison by way of drugs and alcohol, only to find himself even more imprisoned by addiction, seems never to have ceased to be corrosive of his belief in his lovability. Even after he got clean, even decades after his late-adolescent suicide attempt, even after his slow and heroic construction of a life for himself, he felt undeserving. And this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer, finally, than love.”
― Jonathan Franzen
“If you trade your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, and inexplicable grief.”
― Brené Brown
“But money spent while manic doesn't fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you're given excellent reason to be even more so.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind
“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.”
― Ross David Burke, When the Music's Over: My Journey into Schizophrenia
“Between 10 and 20 percent of people with anorexia die from heart attacks, other complications and suicide; the disease has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. Or Kitty could have lost her life in a different way, lost it to the roller coaster of relapse and recovery, inpatient and outpatient, that eats up, on average, five to seven years. Or a lifetime: only half of all anorexics recovery in the end. The other half endure lives of dysfunction and despair. Friends and families give up on them. Doctors dread treating them. They’re left to stand in the bakery with the voice ringing in their ears, alone in every way that matters.”
― Harriet Brown
“Isolated, she managed somehow to feel free—albeit with a freedom that made her want to smash a hole in the very center of the universe.”
― Flora Rheta Schreiber, Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities
“the intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness if my mind's flight made it very difficult for me to believe once i was better, that the illness was one i should willingly give up....moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable reactions to what life has dealt....even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison
“Bipolar robs you of that which is you. It can take from you the very core of your being and replace it with something that is completely opposite of who and what you truly are. Because my bipolar went untreated for so long, I spent many years looking in the mirror and seeing a person I did not recognize or understand. Not only did bipolar rob me of my sanity, but it robbed me of my ability to see beyond the space it dictated me to look. I no longer could tell reality from fantasy, and I walked in a world no longer my own.”
― Alyssa Reyans, Letters from a Bipolar Mother
“Except you cannot outrun insanity, anymore than you can outrun your own shadow.”
― Alyssa Reyans, Letters from a Bipolar Mother
“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.”
― Richey Edwards
“Basically, all women are nurturers and healers, and all men are mental patients to varying degrees.”
― Nelson DeMille, The General's Daughter
“The doctor’s words made me understand what happened to me was a dark, evil, and shameful secret, and by association I too was dark, evil, and shameful. While it may not have been their intention, this was the message my clouded mind received. To escape the confines of the hospital, I once again disassociated myself from my emotions and numbed myself to the pain ravaging my body and mind. I acted as if nothing was wrong and went back to performing the necessary motions to get me from one day to the next. I existed but I did not live.”
― Alyssa Reyans, Letters from a Bipolar Mother
“If only his mind were as easy to fix as his body.”
― Han Nolan, Crazy
“It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis,' or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS
Psychosis can happen out of the blue, to anyone, and no one knows why. Not even the best doctors on the planet.
And that’s why Mom is always so afraid. If we don’t know what made me sick in the first place, how can anyone guarantee I won’t flip out again?”
― Jeannine Garsee, The Unquiet
“I’ve never had anorexia, but I know it well. I see it on the street, in the gaunt and sunken face, the boney chest, the spindly arms of an emaciated woman. I’ve come to recognize the flat look of despair, the hopelessness that follows, inevitably, from years of starvation. I think: That could have been [me]. It wasn’t. It’s not.”
― Harriet Brown, Brave Girl Eating: A Family's Struggle with Anorexia
The inability to correctly perceive reality is often responsible for humans' insane behavior. And every time they substitute an all-purpose, sloppy slang word for the words that would accurately describe an emotion or a situation, it lowers their reality orientations, pushes them farther from shore, out onto the foggy waters of alienation and confusion.'
― Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All
“He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost.”
― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human
“They're the perfect loving fam'ly, so adoring...
And I love them ev'ry day of ev'ry week.
So my son's a little shit, my husband's boring,
And my daughter, though a genius, is a freak.”
― Brian Yorkey, Next to Normal
“When we asked him to sum up his impression of the girls' emotional state at that point, he said, "Buffeted but not broken.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
“The acknowledgement of having suffered evil is the greatest step forward in mental health.”
― Stefan Molyneux
“After my first few tastes I was pretty much hooked. I'd have dry spells, months without any or only piddling amounts of grace, but I never forgot about it or stopped wanting it.”
― Mark Vonnegut, The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity
“I woke from a nightmare to find I had never fallen asleep”
― K.Marie Stewart
“Sometimes it's in the deepest of despair that we find the knowledge we strive for”
― K.Marie Stewart
“It is in my head! That's why it's called Mental Illness.”
― Roni Askey-Doran, I'm Bipolar And I Know It
“If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind
“Many so-called disorders of the mind are simply disorders of thought.”
― Vironika Tugaleva, The Love Mindset
“My sadness is beautiful. It infuses everything I do. It is at the core of my identity and always has been, just as happiness is in some people. I refuse to be told that it's a flaw. I will not mute it with medications for the sake of society. I will hold it close to me and celebrate it rightfully while the rest of the world fails to see it for what it is and it will be their loss.”
― Ashly Lorenzana
“Creativity is closely associated with bipolar disorder. This condition is unique . Many famous historical figures and artists have had this. Yet they have led a full life and contributed so much to the society and world at large. See, you have a gift. People with bipolar disorder are very very sensitive. Much more than ordinary people. They are able to experience emotions in a very deep and intense way. It gives them a very different perspective of the world. It is not that they lose touch with reality. But the feelings of extreme intensity are manifested in creative things. They pour their emotions into either writing or whatever field they have chosen" (pg 181)”
― Preeti Shenoy, Life is What You Make It
“What if talking about your feelings doesn't fix anything? What if what you really need is to make the feelings go away?”
― Amy Reed, Crazy
“A vivid Imagination is awesome a Manic Imagination is a curse.”
― Stanley Victor Paskavich
“Since I am suffering with type 2 bipolar disorder mainly on the depressive side of the bipolar disorder.
I am not afraid nor am I disappointed with it; if this is what God Almighty want me to have; I will make sure that I will make good use of this disorder; and, be the best person that I can be.”
― Temitope Owosela
“Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me's is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind
“Bipolar illness, manic depression, manic-depressive illness, manic-depressive psychosis. That’s a nice way of saying you will feel so high that no street drug can compete and you will feel so low that you wish you had been hit by a Mack truck instead.”
― Christine F. Anderson, Forever Different: A Memoir of One Woman's Journey Living with Bipolar Disorder
“But new love only lasts so long, and then you crash back into the real people you are, and from as high as we were, it's a very long fall, and we hit the ground with a thud.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life
“At first it's bliss. It's drunken, heady, intoxicating. It swallows the people we were - not particuarly wonderful people, but people who did our best, more or less - and spits out the monsters we are becoming.
Our friends despise us. We are an epic. Everything is grand, crashing, brilliant, blinding. It's the Golden Age of Hollywood, and we are a legend in our own minds, and no one outside can fail to see that we are headed for hell, and we won't listen, we say they don't understand, we pour more wine, go to the parties, we sparkle, fly all over the country, we're on an adventure, unstoppable, we've found each other and we race through our days like Mr. Toad in his yellow motorcar, with no idea where the brakes are and to hell with it anyway, we are on fire, drunk with something we call love.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life
“In the terms of 'Mental Illness' Isn't stable a place they put horses that wish to run free?”
― Stanley Victor Paskavich
Never give up on someone with a mental illness. When "I" is replaced by "We", illness becomes wellness.”
― Shannon L. Alder
“You will always fail when there is an absence of actions”
― K.Marie Stewart
while we strive for self knowledge in the depths of our psyche we seem to only find more questions then answers”
― K.Marie Stewart
“Sorrow is like that morning breeze that never really leave”
― K.Marie Stewart
“the longer we wear the mask the hard it is to take off”
― K.Marie Stewart
“Sound of Death
Lips are blue, skin a pale grey
I hear no words, I speak no sound
There's no warmth where I lay
My chest is still, my pulse now warn
I see the stars as light fades before the dawn
I weightlessly walk the morning frost as I see all that I had once lost”
― K.Marie Stewart
“I hope that you can always find something to smile about no matter how hard life gets”
― K.Marie Stewart
“How long until we will be free from our minds mercy”
― K.Marie Stewart
“All Just Puppets
Hands are tied, feet are bound
Trying to scream but cant make a sound
Slave to strings and the hand of man
No feeling no more, fading away like a forgotten war
Help me now and cut me free before I drown in this darkened sea.”
― K.Marie Stewart
“We can find our demons and darkness in any place, any dream or thought but when we realize we don't need to face it alone life can become a lot easier.”
― K.Marie Stewart
“See the bright sun young child, feel the warmth on your face, see the rain falling down as it dances along the ground, see life for what it is before we grow to old, our sight becomes dull and frowns grow where smiles once rang so play now young one before time runs short.”
― K.Marie Stewart
“A void of Sounds from the distant past, a ghost which haunts my mind, with Raging currents which will leave us blind”
― K.Marie Stewart
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