#illness

Because I'm not, in fact, depressed, Prozac makes me manic and numb - one of the reasons I slice my arm in the first place is that I'm coked to the gills on something utterly wrong for what I have. ↗

— Marya Hornbacher

#marya-hornbacher #mental-illness #life

I know the empathy borne of despair; I know the fluidity of thought, the expansive, even beautiful, mind that hypomania brings, and I know this is quicksilver and precious and often it's poison. There has always existed a sort of psychic butcher who works the scales of transcendence, who weighs out the bloody cost of true art. ↗

— David Lovelace

#bipolar #hypomania #manic-depression #mental-illness #art

Home was where others had to gather grace. Home was what I wanted to flee. ↗

— Jerry Pinto

#frustration #home #illness #home

Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of use is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#metaphor #life

Were she better, or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius note, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/But in ourselves. ↗

— John Green

#illness #sickness #starcrossed #stars #nature

His relationship with illness was flirtatious; only a particularly attractive ailment could tempt him into bed. ↗

— Sam Byers

#illness #relationship

My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences. ↗

— Audre Lorde

#illness #cancer

I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been midly manic. When I am my present "normal" self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In sort, for myself, I am a hard act to follow. ↗

— Kay Redfield Jamison

#mania #manic #mental-illness #psychology #present

Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. ↗

— William James

#mental-illness

Sometimes the world is so much sicker than the inmates of its institutions. ↗

— Joanne Greenberg

#hope #mental-health #mental-illness #philosophy #psychology