Jon Ronson Quotes

Please hear this: There are not 'schizophrenics.' There are people with schizophrenia.

I think mental illness is a slippery slope to talk about these days because people are overly diagnosed, overly prescribed, overly everything.

You know, ever since man had any notion that some of his other people, his colleagues, could be different, could be strange, could be severely depressed or what we now recognize as schizophrenia, he was certain that this kind of illness had to come from evil spirits getting into the body.

There is no common standard for education about diagnosis. Distinguishing between bipolar depression and major depressive disorder, for example, can be difficult, and mistakes are common. Misdiagnosis can be lethal. Medications that work well for some forms of depression induce agitation in others.

We must bring the issue of mental illness out into the sunlight, out of the shadow, out of the closet, deal with it, treat people, have centers where people can get the necessary help.

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.

I was sober for, like, a year and a half, and I was 25, and I actually did have a manic episode, and I was diagnosed as bipolar.

It's like any other part of your body - your mental health gets sick, and it needs treatment.

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

People get really irritated by mental illness.

For mental illnesses, we need better access to treatment and diagnosis.

Because my father was a psychiatric nurse, I know my way around the system.

Nothing defines the quality of life in a community more clearly than people who regard themselves, or whom the consensus chooses to regard, as mentally unwell.

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 was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADD/ADHD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) as an adult, but I don't remember a time when I didn't have them. Back in the 1960s, when I was growing up, my symptoms didn't have a name, and you didn't go to the doctor to find out.

I would not be here now if I did not have anti-depressants.

I want to show that the dividing lines between sanity and mental illness have been drawn in the wrong place.

The fact is, psychiatric help is not widely available to CIA agents - and as in the military, there is a stigma attached to admitting post-traumatic stress.

There is no such condition as 'schizophrenia', but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.

I always had a desire to know asylum life more thoroughly - a desire to be convinced that the most helpless of God's creatures, the insane, were cared for kindly and properly.

The vast majority of people who have mental illness problems never hurt anybody.

I am fully persuaded that thousands of our fellow-men might profit equally by a similar course to mine; but, constitutions not being all alike, a different course of treatment may be advisable for the removal of so tormenting an affliction.

In India, therapy is not part of the culture; it has not become such a big need.

There is no fun in psychiatry. If you try to get fun out of it, you pay a considerable price for your unjustifiable optimism.

Treating mental health illness is compassionate and saves money.