Jennifer McMahon Quotes

I believe that all the important people in my life prior to 1982 were victimized by my illness.

There has been a lot of self-doubt and unwelcome events in my life.

I didn't know my dad for a long time. My dad was on drugs and my dad was at the VA Hospital, my dad was off in his own world selling drugs or using them or there would be crack heads in the house or whatever it would be.

My whole family, my father's side, there was a great deal of depression, and my mother's side as well.

My mother's a psychologist, my stepfather's a psychologist, my stepmother is a therapist and my dad's a lawyer. So it was all prominent in my life. I don't know anyone who doesn't know someone on some form of prescription medicine.

I think every family is dysfunctional, and some manage to control it better than others.

'The Fighter' was about a family struggling to overcome and fighting each other sometimes, and I went back and rewrote this script which I had written for my son initially because my son has mood disorder.

My mother was a professional sick person; she took a lot of pain pills. There are many people like that. It's just how they are used to getting attention. I always remember she's the daughter of alcoholics who'd leave her alone at Christmas time.

Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults by confessing our parents' shortcomings.

The federal government has lost its way and largely ignored the needs of people with psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar illness.

You need community support. You're pretty defeated when you're laid low with a mental illness. It's a frightening place to be, and to get up and be able to stand and to move forward and to start functioning again, you need so much support. You need to feel you're not alone.

I had so many people in my family with dementia that it felt like it belonged to me in a way. I feel like the same with teenage depression because I went through it. I feel like I'm allowed to write about it; it's mine.

Recognizing chronic sadness may encourage someone to reach out to a friend, family member, or counselor rather than concealing the distress.

I knew for years I wanted to write a novel that addressed the personal trauma of my older sister, who suffered - and still suffers - from mental illness. For a long time I imagined - and I know it's absurd - that she was an indirect casualty of the Vietnam War.

I was ashamed. My son is a drug addict. What does this mean about me?

But my activities have been pretty much focused in the last almost 30 years on the recovery, of my own recovery, the understanding for my family of my recovery.

I think the value in books like mine, and a great number by other talented writers, is in the ability to bring dark subjects into the open where they are not so dark, where they can be talked about and considered by teens and adults alike.

I've definitely had times in my life where I've been depressed and not able to do anything at all.

The greatest benefit of depression is the fact that when I have talked about it, every so often someone comes up and says, 'You saved my dad's life.'

My mother's father drank and her mother was an unhappy, neurotic woman, and I think she has lived all her life afraid of anyone who drinks for fear something like that might happen to her.

I try not to think about my life. I have no life. I need therapy.

My parents' divorce made an important change in my life. It affected me. After that, when I can't play Wimbledon, it was tough. For one month I was outside the world.

I have other obligations now - the show, my family, my life... though I know that without my sobriety I wouldn't have any of those things.

My father's very public life as Famous Amos was the opposite of that of his ex-wife, my mother Shirley, who was fighting a very private, solitary battle with mental illness.

As an alcoholic, you have no appreciation for your wife or your children's feelings, but I'm making up for that now. I'm winning my children's trust back.