Kerry Kennedy Quotes

I know what it's like to feel marginalized and defeated and humiliated by suffering from a mental illness.

There is no excuse for using someone's mental health as a stick with which to beat them.

After that I couldn't show my face outside. I lost my identity and balance. I was still living with my parents, and they were my only friends. For so many people, this thing with the nurse was confirmation that I must be mad or mentally ill.

I think suicide is sort of like cancer was 50 years ago. People don't want to talk about it, they don't want to know about it. People are frightened of it, and they don't understand, when actually these issues are medically treatable.

I've had a tremendous problem with depression in my life. I'd rather not talk about it, because it's over. But depression is real.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.

The authority of depression is horrifying. I felt like my brain was busted and that I could never feel good again. I really thought that I was never gonna heal.

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.

Until you've had depression I don't think you're qualified to talk about it.

Sadness is a super important thing not to be ashamed about but to include in our lives. One of the bigger problems with sadness or depression is there's so much shame around it. If you have it you're a failure. You are felt as being very unattractive.

I was copeless. Not just hopeless, but copeless. I tried to keep on working because I was ashamed of acknowledging the fact that I was depressed. You don't use that word.

That is the real problem of depression - a condition which will affect an estimated one in five of the population at some point in their lives. It is completely unimaginable until you have been through it.

I have been to hell and back. I had a very, very bad nervous breakdown.

Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting.

Nothing good comes out of depression.

I might look successful and happy being in front of you today, but I once suffered from severe depression and was in total despair.

Mental illnesses are so frightening and there's so much ignorance about them that I think it comforts people to think, 'Oh, well, it happens to these people because they deserve it.'

I spoke so much about being a manic-depressive. I want to bring everyone back to my earliest memories of this companion of mine. Some people call this companion I have an ailment, or worse a terrible nightmare from which some people cannot awaken. I know that I have nothing to be ashamed of. I have nothing that should garner a stigma.

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.

Here is the tragedy: when you are the victim of depression, not only do you feel utterly helpless and abandoned by the world, you also know that very few people can understand, or even begin to believe, that life can be this painful. There is nothing I can think of that is quite as isolating as this.

There is a very moving and ancient connection between cancer and depression.

I do suffer from depression, I suppose. Which isn't that unusual. You know, a lot of people do.

Sit down, man. You're a bloody tragedy.

I've suffered through depression and anxiety my entire life.

When I was in my mid-20s, running a successful company and clinically depressed, I was afraid to talk to anyone other than my psychiatrist about it. I was ashamed that I was even seeing a psychiatrist.