...we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.
Sylvia PlathRead
There is an increasing market for mental hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don't relive it, recreate it.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the importance of experiencing and expressing one's mental health struggles creatively.
In this quote, Sylvia Plath conveys the idea that there is a growing interest in understanding mental health experiences, and she recognizes her own unique perspective as valuable. By suggesting that she would be foolish not to engage with her own experiences, she emphasizes the significance of revisiting and recreating those moments in her artistic work, reflecting the therapeutic value of art and storytelling in processing mental struggles.
In practice
In a mental health awareness speech to emphasize the importance of sharing personal stories.
...we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.
The hardest thing, I think, is to live richly in the present, without letting it be tainted & spoiled out of fear for the future or regret for a badly-managed past.
It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative--which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.
You walked in, laughing, tears welling confused, mingling in your throat. How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?
I keep wanting to crawl back into the womb.
It's the living, the eating, the sleeping that everyone needs. Ideas don't matter so much after all. My three best friends are Catholic. I can't see their beliefs, but I can see the things they love to do on earth. When you come right down to it, I do believe in the freedom of the individual.
When I believe, I am crazy. When I donβt believe, _x000D_ I suffer psychotic depression.
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.
That's what stress management is about, that's what psychotherapy is about, finding religion, or finding your loved one or your hobby - any of those, they give you more outlets, more of a sense of control, more of a sense of predictability, of social support. They give you the means to psychologically finesse ambiguous outside reality.
You can't fix yourself out of a mental health issue. You can't wake up and say, 'Today I'm not being depressed!' It's a process to get well, but there is recovery.
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.
Several politicians and wives of politicians have been public about their experiences with depression or bipolar illness, including Lawton Chiles, Patrick Kennedy, Tipper Gore and Kitty Dukakis. Each made a tremendous difference by doing so.
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