Stigma of Mental Illness Quotes

Once you've been in a mental institution, people are going to look at you funny.

Anyone who is different or is slightly out of the norm, is considered crazy.

The idea that all the people locked up in mental hospitals are sane while all the people walking about are mad is merely a literary cliche, put about by people who should be locked up. I assure you there is not much in it. Taken as a whole, the sane are out there the sick are in here. For example you are in here because you have delusions that sane people are put in mental hospitals.

And if you're lucky enough to survive going crazy and get back to the point where you can pass for normal, it builds a question into the rest of your life. You have to forgive people for wondering, 'How all right can he be?'

If addicts can be punished for their addiction then the insane can also be punished for their insanity. Each has a disease and each must be treated as a sick person.

You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded.

We know that mental illness is not something that happens to other people. It touches us all. Why then is mental illness met with so much misunderstanding and fear?

Never tell a crazy person he’s crazy.

... I want the world to know that people like me who have returned from the half-world of mental oblivion are not forever contaminated. We have been sick.

Mental illness is a myth, whose function is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations.

A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And Me. Suicide was supposed to be cool.

People said, ‘You must be mad, or on drugs,’ which I found a bit disappointing. What about imagination? It reflects our time that people sooner assume you’re on drugs or mad, rather than free.

I didn't know a damned thing about mental illness and neither did anyone around me.

I gave myself the nickname 'Bipolar Rock N' Roller' way back in the 1990s, when - as much as we don't talk about mental health now - back then it was almost nonexistent. And if it was broached, it was done in a very pejorative way.

Women in stores will pull their children away from me sometimes so they won't catch the crazy Creed virus. Other folks are disappointed that I'm not that guy in person.

In an ideal world, it would not take a film star to get the media focused on mental illness.

Sometimes actresses are just insane.

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.

When you have mental illness you don't have a plaster or a cast or a crutch, that let everyone know that you have the illness, so people expect the same of you as from anyone else and when you are different they give you a hard time and they think you're being difficult or they think you're being a pain in the ass and they're horrible to you. You spend your life in Ireland trying to hide that you have a mental illness.

Sarah Palin, suggesting her son's arrest on domestic violence charges was a result of post-traumatic stress disorder and partially due to President Obama's lack of respect for men and women in uniform.

There is enormous shame around depression of any kind and at any time. And there's enormous social stigma attached to it, which we need to go on fighting. But I think that the sense of depression during pregnancy and early motherhood has been particularly stigmatized, that people especially feel that should be the happiest time of your life.

Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artefact of your mental illness.

If people can talk about having breast cancer, why can't people who have mental illness talk about mental illness? Until we're able to do that, we're not going to be treated with the same kind of respect for our diseases as other people.

I’m going to be mentally ill in fifteen years, and that’s why my husband doesn’t want to be around me.

For every age there is a popular idea about what madness is, what causes it, and how a mad person should look and behave; and it's usually these popular ideas, rather than those of medical professionals, that turn up in songs and stories and plays and books.