Illness Stigma Quotes

When you cry out in pain from a broken wrist, no one questions it. You just go to the hospital and take the necessary steps. Mental illness is just as real, even if it can't be seen.

Stigma against mental illness is a scourge with many faces, and the medical community wears a number of those faces.

What? I have a cold. Don’t get a look of terror on your face. The worst that could happen is that you’ll get a cold, too. You don’t have to theatrically Purell a thousand times a day and look all panicky every time I come into the room.

Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.

It's a shame that cancer has been something that's been accepted in society as something that's always gonna be there.

Fatal illness has always been viewed as a test of moral character, but in the nineteenth century there is a great reluctance to let anybody flunk the test.

I was really sick and I walked outside of the bus and realised; oh no I'm not allowed to be sick. I'm not allowed to say; sorry no I can't pose with you for a photo because I'm sick. I am a super human now, or I have to be one.

I don't want to be defined by being the founder of the Body Shop, and I don't want to be defined as a woman suffering from Hepatitis C. There's more to my life than that.

I took the test for AIDS. I began to hate people who were not sick. Those people are monsters, I would think, believing that they are well because of moral superiority, because they are good. I identified with the loneliness of the sick. I felt that there was something pure about them.

I do not find illness an eminence, and I do not understand how people can use it to draw attention to themselves since the attention they draw is nearly always reluctantly given and unpleasantly carried out.

Treating an identity as an illness invites real illness to make a braver stand.

It is human nature to look away from illness. We don't enjoy a reminder of our own fragile mortality. That's why writing on the Internet has become a lifesaver for me. My ability to think and write have not been affected. And on the Web, my real voice finds expression.

A lot of people don't realize that depression is an illness. I don't wish it on anyone, but if they would know how it feels, I swear they would think twice before they just shrug it.

Now I'm being blamed not only for anorexia but for lung cancer.

The difficult thing with mental illness is that there's no one to blame. You can't blame a person who's mentally ill, because they didn't ask for it! There's no choice to it.

My goal is to see that mental illness is treated like cancer.

One of the reasons I didn't tell people I had cancer was I thought it might affect work.