James D. Watson Quotes

My wife and I have a schizophrenic son. We didn't want to accept this for 30 years, so we put him under great pressure when we shouldn't have. He just wanted to be looked after, and we didn't respect that. We tried to make him independent.

Sometimes a mother finds in her midst a handicapped child, one child who is abnormal mentally or physically. Then, a whole new set of baffling difficulties presents themselves, and then fervently she prays and how diligently she searches every avenue to find an answer to that child's problems.

As a carer for my disabled son, I understand just how hard caring is, at the best of times. I know how important it is for families to get the support they need.

My mom was my mother and father. My father lost his mind when I was about 4 years old. And my mom did everything she could to make sure that we was brought up right.

There are lots of people with mental health disabilities, and that's just the way their life is; it's not like you see it in the movies.

Some people say I'm unique, that there aren't other people with schizophrenia like me. Well, there are people like me out there, but the stigma is so great that they don't come forward.

As a kid, I was scared of losing my mind. In Terrell, Texas, where I grew up, there was a guy that would walk down the street talking to himself. And I used to watch him and feel uneasy. And there was a sanitarium where people would say, 'That's where all the crazy people go.' It really sort of frightened me.

Most people, if you live in a big city, you see some form of schizophrenia every day, and it's always in the form of someone homeless. 'Look at that guy - he's crazy. He looks dangerous.' Well, he's on the streets because of mental illness. He probably had a job and a home.

I spend a fair bit of time in Los Angeles, and there is much I love about the place - the weather, the food, the beaches and the golf. And a few things I don't. Like the way an enormous number of mentally ill people seem to be forced to live on the streets with little or nothing in the way of government assistance.

I have nine children... and one of them is an invalid. Her mother is obliged to take her away in the winter, and when one bird is off the nest, the other has to go on.

What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all.

One of my sisters is physically and mentally handicapped. She took a lot of my parents' attention, so I grew up in my own world, playing in my room for hours and hours.

Mental health needs a great deal of attention. It's the final taboo and it needs to be faced and dealt with.

Even when I'm in a really great, steady and stable place... I'm clinically bipolar, so that always exists - a darkness always exists.

God will not damn a lunatic's soul. He knows that the powers of evil are too great for those of us with weak minds.

One of the reasons the doctors gave for hospitalizing me against my will was that I was 'gravely disabled.' To support this view, they wrote in my chart that I was unable to do my Yale Law School homework. I wondered what that meant about much of the rest of New Haven.

Mental illnesses are so frightening and there's so much ignorance about them that I think it comforts people to think, 'Oh, well, it happens to these people because they deserve it.'

I completely admire my mother for raising a child with cerebral palsy at home.

I'm not one of those guys that has a great worldview. I kind of deal with terror and fear and isolation and abandonment.

Families with disabled children are praying for their kids to die before them because they have no support systems. They are very scared about who will take care of their kids and how their kids will have a dignified life after they die.

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

Kids are born into the situation they're born into, and obviously, they have no control over that. And we, as adults, it's up to us to take care of kids - that's part of your moral responsibility. I always tell people, 'There's two groups we should take care of - old people and young people.'

Having deinstitutionalized mental health, we have not created the structure and the institutions to take care of people, to identify when there is a mental health problem, and to get the treatment to people.

I was putting on a stiff upper lip and trying to fulfill the obligations I thought were demanded of me, taking over my father's role of taking care of my mother... and having to be the recipient of her confessions and emotions but of a delusional nature.

Being Stephen's carer was such a struggle, and it's a lonely job looking after a disabled person. Thinking back, I honestly wonder how I got through it.