Dave Pelzer Quotes

Stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness.

In Jenny Offill's remarkable first novel, 'Last Things,' 7-year-old Grace Davitt watches her mother, Anna, descend into madness and tries to make sense of the claustrophobic world that Anna has created for her.

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.

My parents hate each other, and I think that's why I never wanted anyone to get close to me.

Folks working late, I had a babysitter. I ain't about to sit here and name her. I was almost 8 when she came in late, woke me up with a game to play. Did a few things that it's hard to say. Told me to keep that secret safe. I'm trying to act like it ain't real. Had my innocence just stripped from me, and I still don't know how to feel.

She thought of what it would be like to grow up without the one certainty that every baby deseved - when I'm hurt or cold or scared, someone will come and care for me - and how that absence could warp you so that you'd lash out at the people you loved, driving them away when all you wanted to do was pull them closer.

I'm almost positive I have some type of PTSD. Almost a decade of my life was consumed by the prison system.

I remember, after my first postpartum depression, I didn't know what had happened to me. I was stuck in this gray depression where I just wanted to retreat and pull the covers over my head and weep. My mother and I, we went to a psychiatrist, and he just patted me on the head and told me I had baby blues, which was not helpful, obviously.

only a thin partition separates the psychically normal from the diseased.

When I was sectioned for six months, that was one of the worst experiences of my life, not being able to go out and have freedom. Having experienced it, it's almost inexplicably awful.

The Joker is a psychopathic, mass-murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy. Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night. I couldn't stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.

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

I was born with a nervous breakdown.

Would you carry a razor, in case, just in case of depression?

Suicide is the only way out.

The real Rose Hovick was seriously mentally disturbed; June Havoc called her a beautiful little ornament that was damaged.

I know how this feels: the tightening of the chest, the panic, the what-have-I-done-wait-I-was-kidding. Eating disorders linger so long undetected, eroding the body in silence, and then they strike. The secret is out. You're dying.

Seriousness is a disease.

You never can tell, though, with suicide notes, can you? In the planetary aggregate of all life, there are many more suicide notes than there are suicides. They're like poems in that respect, suicide notes: nearly everyone tries their hand at them some time, with or without the talent. We all write them in our heads. Usually the note is the thing. You complete it, and then resume your time travel. It is the note and not the life that is cancelled out. Or the other way round. Or death. You never can tell, though, can you, with suicide notes.

Your ideal possession candidate's a thirteen-year-old recently orphaned schizophrenic girl three days away from her period on her way to see the shrink with whom she's romantically besotted.

I don't think grief of grief in a medical way at all. I think that I and many of my colleagues, are very concerned when grief becomes pathological, that there is no question that grief can trigger depression in vulnerable people and there is no question that depression can make grief worse.

The only reason I remembered this play was because it had a mad person in it, and everything I had ever read about mad people stuck in my mind, while everything else flew out.

No, my friend. We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of mankind. Would you like me to decipher a Rorschach for you?

Do you have a multiple personality disorder?

He seems to me to be headed for his ideal fate, which is compulsive psychosis dashed with a jigger of psychopathic irresponsibility and violence