Quotes on Mental Illness

I am not mad; I would to heaven I were! For then, 'tis like I should forget myself; O, if I could, what grief should I forget!

Though many schizophrenics become curiously attached to their delusions, the fading of the nondelusional world puts them in loneliness beyond all reckoning, a fixed residence on a noxious private planet they can never leave, and where they can receive no visitors.

A terrible depression yesterday. Visions of my life petering out into a kind of soft-brained stupor from lack of use.

Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artefact of your mental illness.

[It] is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.

There's something in us that is very much attracted to madness. Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt at least a faint, morbid urge to jump. And anyone who has ever put a loaded pistol up to his head... All right, my point is this: even the most well-adjusted person is holding onto his or her sanity by a greased rope. I really believe that. The rationality circuits are shoddily built into the human animal.

Once our minds are 'tattooed' with negative thinking, our chances for long-term success diminish.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.

Romantic love is mental illness. But it's a pleasurable one. It's a drug. It distorts reality, and that's the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw.

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.

I'm living under water. Everything seems slow and far away. I know there's a world up there, a sunlit quick world where time runs like dry sand through an hourglass, but down here, where I am, air and sound and time and feeling are thick and dense.