Ornette Coleman Quotes

We often hear of people breaking down from overwork, but in nine out of ten they are really suffering from worry or anxiety.

I thought about dying whenever I got bad news about other people.

I think my real depressions started when I was about 16 and doing The Patty Duke Show. I would go to bed at about 10 o'clock on a Friday night and not get up again until 6:30 Monday morning.

There are days when I should be writing, and I am so tired that I can't. And the fatigue also affects my emotions, making me not even care about writing. There are days when I wake up so angry I can barely speak, and also days when I am so sad.

I wanted to put a human face on anxiety disorders. I thought people who suffer from anxiety might recognize themselves and gain some comfort from my story and for those who don't suffer from anxiety disorders gain some understanding.

The time I kill is killing me.

Medically speaking, there is no such thing as a nervous breakdown. Which is very annoying to discover when you're right in the middle of one.

The truth is, I've been going pretty much nuts all year. I constantly have to fight being scattered. I feel like I'm on automatic pilot from fatigue. The hardest thing is trying to be present, living for the moment, for everybody in the family.

Compassion Fatigue

I have probably been very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions.

I think that technology - computers and smart phones and 24-hour availability - often leaves me, and others I know, feeling blank and depressed at the end of a day. I also believe that hyped expectations for raising children leaves many women and men feeling as if their days are a blur of carpools and play-groups and tutors.

I am a clinical zombie.

When I wasn't touring I'd be really down, then suddenly after a few weeks of crazy travelling - America, a double headline with Ray Davies in Denmark, TV shows here and just partying... Suddenly I had an acute psychotic breakdown.

I have anxiety and have had depression in the past.

Often, when you're growing up, you don't know what's wrong. We don't talk openly enough about mental illness. How do you know - especially today with the incredibly high stress teens are put under during high school - if you have depression or if you have a mental illness or if you have anxiety? You don't know, because you've never seen it.

Any time I got in emotional turmoil, I felt sick all the time, like at any minute I would die.

I have my own demons and dark moods. It's weird.

There's a book that's critical to understanding anxiety, a 17th-century book, 'The Anatomy of Melancholy,' by Robert Burton. I wanted to write something like that.

Sometimes you can know too much. A lot of brainy people like Stephen Fry are quite depressive.

Cutting, and suicide, two very different symptoms of the same problem, are gaining on us. I personally don't know a single person who doesn't know at least two of these victims personally.

I feel a lot. I get really bad stomachaches all the time. So I went to a doctor, and he said, 'You're a feeler.' I take on people's pain a little too much.

I was pretty burned out in '85 and was getting - starting to get into some issues.

I was so busy fighting and so busy trying to keep everything above water that I didn't realize I was spiraling downward with nowhere to go.

I depleted myself to the point where I had nothing left.

I was just absolutely exhausted. The media said I've been treated for a nervous breakdown. All that stuff I just took as people taking the opportunity when you're down to give you a kick.