Mental Health Quotes

“The first fall made me stronger
Another and then the other one made me
hollow inside

The last fall will break me
But I will survive”
― Annette Dabrowska, Behind the Ghost Metropolis: Mental Health and Healing Poetry Book

“Grief doesn’t end; it changes shape and travels with you.”
― Vikki Espinosa, One in Eight: A Breast Cancer Journey and Practical Guide for Patients, Families, and Workplaces

“Healing isn’t linear, and it isn’t quiet.”
― Vikki Espinosa, One in Eight: A Breast Cancer Journey and Practical Guide for Patients, Families, and Workplaces

“In 1897, the French sociologist émile Durkheim—perhaps the most profound thinker about the nature of society—wrote a book about the social causes of suicide. Drawing on data that was just becoming available as governments began to keep statistics, he noted that in Europe the general rule was that the more tightly people are bound into a community that has the moral authority to restrain their desires, the less likely they are to kill themselves.

A central concept for Durkheim was anomie , or normlessness—an absence of stable and widely shared norms and rules. Durkheim was concerned that modernity, with its rapid and disorienting changes and its tendency to weaken the grip of traditional religions, fostered anomie and thus suicide. He wrote that when we feel the social order weakening or dissolving, we don’t feel liberated; we feel lost and anxious:

If this [binding social order] dissolves, if we no longer feel it in existence and action about and above us, whatever is social in us is deprived of all objective foundation. All that remains is an artificial combination of illusory images, a phantasmagoria vanishing at the least reflection; that is, nothing which can be a goal for our action. [68]”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness

“It's not easy to get close to anyone in here, Tony. Everyone's afraid of everybody else...maybe because we are all afraid of ourselves.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Impulse

“Forever has no meaning when you're living in the moment. I wasn't ready for that moment to end.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Impulse

“I'm feeling better too. Like maybe there's a place for me - a place I might even want to be.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Impulse

“Love means holding on to someone just as hard as you can because if you don't, one blink and they might disappear forever.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Impulse

“And how can it be he's so in love with me? To grow up without love and still have so much inside?”
― Ellen Hopkins, Impulse

“Life is all about change. If it were static, think about how boring it would be. You can't be afraid of it, and you can't worry that you'll mess things up. You deserve good things, and I want to be one of them.”
― Ellen Hopkins, Impulse

“I know cigarettes are killing me from the inside, but so are my illnesses. And after years of juggling meds—five, six, maybe more—my psychiatrist and I have finally, I think, landed on a combination that holds me together. I’m not claiming the pills are weak, or that they should perform miracles and pull every last demon out of my head in an instant. Healing isn’t a switch. It’s slow. It drags.

But even with the medication steadying me, there are still nights when anxiety claws at my ribs, when depression sinks its teeth into my spine, when I feel misplaced in my own life.
So I smoke. Because for a moment—just a thin, burning moment—it quiets the storm.

Maybe smoking is the small tax I pay to keep myself from collapsing, from snapping, from tipping into madness.
The price is bearable.
Losing my mind wouldn’t be.”
― Mohit Yenugwar

“Everything in your life can be done better when you come from Calm Clarity.”
― Lisa A Barrett, How to Live an Empowered Life: Easy and Practical Daily Tools

“Is there a breathing exercise
for not wanting to participate in life?”
― Pip Harry, Drift

“Sending love to my sisters with the prescriptions, be they long-term or short-term. Well done. You are taking the best possible care of yourselves, and I am proud of you. There is zero shame in this, unless we should be ashamed of creating strong, steady lives for ourselves and the people we love.”
― Jen Hatmaker, Awake

“Some wounds don’t bleed — they erase you slowly from the inside.”
― Tarek El fedaey, THE GIRL THEY TRIED TO ERASE: A Psychological Fiction Novel

“He notes it, asks again: Why was her ship sinking?

Her ship? It’s always sinking, she hates it, it’s either sinking or it’s exploding, either way it never seems to be going anywhere.”
― Olivie Blake, Alone With You in the Ether

“The health of the nation can be considered by analyzing the voting majority who elected a sexual predator over a woman.”
― Deanna L. Lawlis

“She said, "don't be scared, little one." I wasn't scared. I'd just never seen a girl with skin like mine.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces

“She said, "don't be scared, little one." I wasn't scared. I'd just never seen a girl with skin like mine.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces

“Of course, being crazy can instead be a stubborn expression of self-destructive willfulness. There appear to be many people who choose to go crazy (or become alcoholics, addicts, criminals, suicides) rather than have to bear the pain and ambiguity of a life situation that they have decided that they cannot stand. With such patients, I try to make clear that I cannot prevent their going mad, but that I will not follow their madcap course from home to hospital and back. They may have any crazy feelings and ideas they wish, but in their community they have to act as if they were sane, if they want me to accompany them on their pilgrimage. The irresponsible act of going crazy, in order not to have to face up to the mess they have created in their own lives, is not one to which I wish to be an accomplice.”
― Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients

“Hold on, for some time, to leap beyond the limit of giving up.”
― Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma

“Hold on a little longer to leap beyond the edge of giving up.”
― Vikrmn: CA Vikram Verma

“Wanting to play God first requires one to believe that there isn't any or that it is actually you, while claiming to represent God may very well be the next 'best' thing.”
― Arne Klingenberg

“Când am intrat prima dată într-o școală, acum 20 de ani, nu știam că începuturile pot fi atât de zguduitoare. Ani la rând am încercat să mă adaptez unui sistem care nu se adapta niciodată la mine. Am învățat din mers ce înseamnă identitatea unui profesor, cât de mult te expune o clasă și cât de repede se vede adevărul tău interior când stai în fața copiilor.

Astăzi sunt psiholog și lucrez cu profesori, adolescenți și adulți care trec prin aceleași întrebări pe care le-am avut și eu.

Există un moment în viața fiecărui profesor în care își pune aceeași întrebare: De ce nu mi-a spus nimeni cum e, de fapt? Am creat această resursă pentru ca debutanții să nu meargă singuri. Ca să știe că nu este nimic în neregulă cu ei dacă se simt copleșiți.”
― Carmen Neagu nee Eni

“Stopping drinking and drugging didn't suddenly solve my problems - not even close - but it did clear a little spot on the filthy windscreen of my life to peer through, just enough to begin to assess the damage and ponder the kind of person I might one day become.”
― Gregory P. Smith, Better than Happiness: The True Antidote to Discontent

“I had said yes to everything, for so long, that my body finally said no for me.”
― Vivek Naik, The Cost of Yes: Stop People-Pleasing, Set Boundaries, and Recover from Burnout Without Guilt

“I reckon anger is the cigarette smoking of emotions. It's toxic, self-destructive, offensive, socially unacceptable, and harmful to others; it costs a lot and always leaves a bad taste in the mouth. It's also a mongrel to try to quit.”
― Gregory P. Smith, Better than Happiness: The True Antidote to Discontent

“Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”
― Gregory P. Smith

“i knew you were going to try and kill yourself before you did it. i knew because before all this happened you were the only person my seven-year-old nephew with asperger's ever let hug him. you were eighteen and you were just shining, your even brown skin competing with the bright blue sky for my attention. god, you were perfect. i was in love with the idea that finally we had given birth to a generation that didn't have to spend their adult lives recovering from their childhoods. you weren't going to drown yourself in anything, you were just going to smile and fight in some mythological honourable way we'd all only imagined. then i found out your mama was about to die and every time you looked me in the eye i wanted to cry, because i knew there was a diagnosed train wreck coming your way and i didn't know how someone so perfect could survive.”
― Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Islands of Decolonial Love: Stories & Songs

“I mistook disappearing for becoming.”
― Shereen Behairy, I Healed You Before I Met You: Letters to the Voices That Once Lived in Me — Volume I