Elyn Saks Quotes

We must stop criminalizing mental illness. It's a national tragedy and scandal that the L.A. County Jail is the biggest psychiatric facility in the United States.

To me, I don't write when I'm depressed. If I'm depressed, which is actually rare, I'm not doing anything, you know, and I'm not able to do anything.

Public safety is too important to be left to psychiatry.

I remember being in middle and high school and hearing Demi Lovato speak up about her mental illness, and that was comforting.

It is important to note that most of the patients in Ohio's mental health facilities have never committed crimes. They are institutionalised because they have lost touch with reality and are having problems functioning unaided in the community.

So I had a choice between going to a jail or going to a bughouse like a nice young middle-class student. So I chose to go to a very polite mental hospital. When I left eight months later, they said, 'You were never psychotic. You were just an average neurotic.'

What's the first image that comes to mind when you think of a mental hospital? Jack Nicholson in 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,' right? We need to change that perception, and places like this one are doing that.

Boundaries aren't all bad. That's why there are walls around mental institutions.

Our hospital was famous and housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?

The sooner you 'settle' the sooner you'll be allowed home" was the ruling logic; and "if you can't adapt yourself to living in a mental hospital how do you expect to be able to live 'out in the world'?" How indeed?

If I weren't doing what I'm doing now, the actress thing, the star business, if you want to call it that, whatever it is, I'd be in an asylum. I'm sure of it.

I had a hundred and seventeen days in which to convince Will Traynor that he had a reason to live.

I worked in a schizophrenic home when I was an undergrad. You learned to be jaded to the crazy things they would say to you, but there was one man that I always gave crazy respect to, even though he would say the exact same thing to me every single day.

Inspiration is what keeps us well.

Involuntary mental hospitalization is like slavery. Refining the standards for commitment is like prettifying the slave plantations. The problem is not how to improve commitment, but how to abolish it

It's easy to become hopeless. So people must have hope: the human brain, the resilience of nature, the energy of young people and the sort of inspiration that you see from so many hundreds of people who tackle tasks that are impossible and never give up and succeed.

Eating healthy and taking care of my body and my mind really make me come alive, and seeing others doing that inspires me to stay with it. I always feel great when I do.

Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.

I am a monopolar depressive descended from monopolar depressives. That's how come I write so good.

From a public health point of view, still the overwhelming problem is that people are not treated enough for depression; depression remains under treated.

If you can manage to experience three positive emotions for every one negative emotion … you dramatically improve your health and your ability to successfully tackle any problem you're facing.

There is this view that if you are not tormented you cannot be vital and creative. I would like to think that is not true.

I think it's only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there.

The insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island is a human rat-trap. It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out.

For many of us, the hospital was as much a refuge as it was a prison. Though we were cut off from the world and all the trouble we enjoyed stirring up out there, we were also cut off from the demands and expectations that had driven us crazy. What could be expected of us now that we were stowed away in a loony bin?