Only if you're kind to yourself, can you be kind to others.
Ruby WaxRead
How come every other organ in your body can get sick and you get sympathy, except the brain?
Interpretation
Mental health issues often go unrecognized or stigmatized compared to physical ailments.
Ruby Wax's quote highlights the societal stigma around mental health, emphasizing that while other bodily organs receive sympathy when affected by illness, the brain, which governs our mental health, is often overlooked and misunderstood. This reflects a broader conversation about the normalization of discussing mental health and the importance of acknowledging that emotional and psychological suffering is as valid as physical ailments.
In practice
In a mental health awareness campaign, this quote can remind individuals to empathize with those struggling with psychological issues.
When you're depressed, there's no calendar. There are no dates, there's no day, there's no night, there's no seconds, there's no minutes, there's nothing. You're just existing in this cold, murky, ever-heavy atmosphere, like they put you inside a vial of mercury.
My mother struggled immensely with mental illness, and so did I. She grew up bipolar, but it was never diagnosed nor recognized. It was shrugged off like a 'symptom' of being female - of her being weak. I also experienced this growing up: I felt that the great pain I experienced was a dramatisation.
Being a depressive should not imply danger any more than being a man or even a human should. Mental illness isn't a them/us issue; we are all on the scale somewhere. So we must be very careful to resist ignorance and combat the stigma that leads to dangerous silence.
Depression is a prison where you are both the suffering prisoner and the cruel jailer.
I guess I realize that I don't want to die. I don't want to live either, but-there really isn't anything in-between. Depression is about as close as you get to somewhere between dead and alive, and it's the worst. But since the tendency toward inertia means that it's easier for me to stay alive than die, I guess that's how it's going to be, so I guess I should try to be happy.
When I was coming out of depression, I made one random video. It wasn't funny or anything, but just the idea that people I didn't know were watching it made me feel less alone than I'd felt in a long time.
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