Jimmy Piersall Quotes

I am mentally ill. I can say that. I am not ashamed of that. I survived that, I'm still surviving it, but bring it on. Better me than you.

People tend to look at mental health differently than physical health. If someone tears their ACL, we don't expect them to run 30 yards for a touchdown. They need to be treated and have the time to rest and heal, It's the same thing for mental health.

There is nothing wrong with me. These are really sick people, sick that you can see.

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.

I'd had episodes before, but I swept them under the carpet. This time, I couldn't do that because everyone knew. I got on with the hard work of getting better and haven't had a blip in almost 10 years.

Getting to have an opportunity to tell a story that is about mental illness and how it affects one's self and one's community was really something that really meant a lot to me.

I take antidepressants, which I was embarrassed about for a long time, but it keeps me going.

I gave myself the nickname 'Bipolar Rock N' Roller' way back in the 1990s, when - as much as we don't talk about mental health now - back then it was almost nonexistent. And if it was broached, it was done in a very pejorative way.

My dad died, and he wasn't in my life because he had schizophrenia, so it's been something that my entire family has been fighting against since I can remember.

Many people with mental illness suffer in silence, afraid to seek help for fear of victimisation.

When you have mental illness you don't have a plaster or a cast or a crutch, that let everyone know that you have the illness, so people expect the same of you as from anyone else and when you are different they give you a hard time and they think you're being difficult or they think you're being a pain in the ass and they're horrible to you. You spend your life in Ireland trying to hide that you have a mental illness.

I wanted to tell people, "My depression is acting up today" as an excuse for not seeing them, but I never managed to pull it off.

If people can talk about having breast cancer, why can't people who have mental illness talk about mental illness? Until we're able to do that, we're not going to be treated with the same kind of respect for our diseases as other people.

Diagnoses exist to help get people services they need - but there's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill.

We know that mental illness is not something that happens to other people. It touches us all. Why then is mental illness met with so much misunderstanding and fear?

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.

I always had a dissociative disorder. But I healed from it over the course of 14 years of big-time therapy. But, you know, I mean, everybody's kind of loony now. So I was kind of a pioneer in the mental illness thing, too.

When public figures remain silent about depression, there is a cost to the rest of society. Silence contributes to the misperception that successful people do not get depressed, and it keeps the public from seeing that treatment allows many individuals to return to competitive professional lives.

People accuse me of glamorizing mental illness. Looking back sometimes, that's true. But I don't feel guilty.

That's like making fun of a maniac because his brain isn't completely right, because he isn't in the norm.

Mental illness is the last frontier. The gay thing is part of everyday life now on a show like 'Modern Family,' but mental illness is still full of stigma. Maybe it is time for that to change.

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.

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

People are always selling the idea that people with mental illness are suffering. I think madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better.

The strongest predictor of unhappiness is anyone who has had a mental illness in the last 10 years. It is an even stronger predictor of unhappiness than poverty - which also ranks highly.