Allen Ginsberg Quotes

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.

You can never turn the clock back and, since we're talking about mental health, I would stress that.

The guilt I felt for having a mental illness was horrible. I prayed for a broken bone that would heal in six weeks. But that never happened. I was cursed with an illness that nobody could see and nobody knew much about.

When it's a really dark emotional scene, you have to make the effort to shake it off, at the end of the day, before you go home to your kids and try to be a normal human being. You definitely want to make that effort to shake it off.

I was born with a nervous breakdown.

I think the value in books like mine, and a great number by other talented writers, is in the ability to bring dark subjects into the open where they are not so dark, where they can be talked about and considered by teens and adults alike.

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

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.

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

Thinking you've had depression makes about as much sense as thinking you've been run over by a bus. Trust me - you know when you've got depression.

Well, my brother was a schizophrenic, so I understood it in a different way from seeing my brother.

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.

Most of me was glad when my mother died. She was a handful, but not in a cute, festive way. More in a life-threatening way, that had caused me a long time ago to give up all hope of ever feeling good about having had her as a mother.

The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. It's like a cancer that's metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?

My three obsessions are mental illness, horror and religion.

It's hard enough to work and raise a family when your kids are all healthy and relatively normal, but when you add on some kind of disability or disease, it can just be such a burden.

If I woke up and didn't have Tourette's syndrome, it would feel weird - not better or worse, just different.

Do I wish I had never endured postpartum depression? Absolutely. But to deny the experience is to deny who I am.

A diagnosis is burden enough without being burdened by secrecy and shame.

I just couldn't go back to Suddenly Susan after David Strickland's suicide. I didn't see how we could make the show light and funny any more.

In 2008, while the film version of my book 'Choke' was coming to market, my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. That meant that I had to appear in public to promote a comedy about a son trying to save his dying mother - the plot of Choke - while privately I was caring for my own dying mother. It was torture.

I couldn't be with someone who is depressed all the time.

When you've been locked up in a mental institution, people are going to ask questions. It was OK, because I didn't have to act perfect all the time.

I believe that all the important people in my life prior to 1982 were victimized by my illness.