Alice Miller Quotes

The portrayal of post-traumatic stress disorder and things like that felt really big and important.

My inner child is not wounded.

Once you can accept that you have a mental illness, that is when you can work on it.

… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.

At age 12, I was put on tranquilizers when I should have gotten help. There was nothing major and awful, I just didn't feel my family was supportive and emotionally generous.

When I was a kid, I used to see apparitions and have hallucinations, and my entire perception of the world was badly disoriented. And I had kind of a chaotic childhood because of that. I've really hung onto it, though. Because I actually like those feelings.

Going to a therapist is not something you do when you're growing up as a street kid in Toronto.

When I first went up to see my editor, I was with my agent, and my editor said, 'Well, what have you been doing all these years?' And my agent said, 'He's been in recovery. From his childhood.'

I was pretty troubled for a long time. And I didn't know that. As a kid, I never talked about my emotions. My mom gave me a journal, but I didn't know what it meant. I just wrote all the time, not even thinking about it. But it also made me feel better.

Everybody faces pain. Everybody has trauma.

I've been in therapy since I was five, but music goes way, way, way, way, way beyond therapy.

If a kid is born into a tough situation with no means of dealing with it, you end up with kids who are mentally ill and have no way of reaching out.

Here's something a little more personal: In my teens, I was having a hard time and ended up in a therapy group of young women, some of whom had endured terrible childhood traumas.

I was able to battle back through depression.

At least you know that you're crazy. That means you have the potential to recover.

A child born today in the United Kingdom stands a ten times greater chance of being admitted to a mental hospital than to a university ... This can be taken as an indication that we are driving our children mad more effectively than we are genuinely educating them. Perhaps it is our way of educating them that is driving them mad.

He only wishes there were something that would heal the scars in his mind, which he can still feel. He sees his mind now as an archipelago of islands that he labors to build bridges between - and while he's had great success engineering the most spectacular of bridges, he suspects there are some islands that he'll never reach.

Through the healing process of time-and through medical intervention or hospitalization in many cases-most people survive depression which may be its only blessing; but to the tragic legion who are compelled to destroy themselves there should be no more reproof attached than to the victims of terminal cancer.

later down the road of life, i made the discovery that salt water was also good for the mental abrasions one inevitably acquires on land.

Terror acts powerfully upon the body, through the medium of the mind, and should be employed in the cure of madness.

We listened to them, but it was clear they'd received too much therapy to know the truth.

I think a neurotic learns from their mistakes. A psychotic does not.

You can't love somebody into a state of mental health.

What if we never 'get over' certain deaths, or our childhoods? What if the idea that we should have by now, or will, is a great palace lie? What if we're not supposed to? What if it takes a life time...?

For a while, I thought I was going mad. At last, I became reconciled to my despair. The medications helped, too, I thought, sir.