#illness

It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window. ↗

— Sam Harris

#mental-illness #communication

If suffering like hers had any use, she reasoned, it was not to the sufferer. The only way that an individual's pain gained meaning was through its communication to others. ↗

— Diane Wood Middlebrook

#helping-others #mental-illness #relating #self-disclosure #suffering

I'm so good at beginnings, but in the end I always seem to destroy everything, including myself. ↗

— Kiera Van Gelder

#mental-illness #dating

Sometimes there's nothing you can do. [...] Sometimes they don't have enough to fight with. ↗

— Tamora Pierce

#death #flick #helplessness #henna #illness

It never occurred to them that God may have provided the world with a vast array of very brainy medical types for the very reason of solving problems such as theirs. However, there is one thing that the medical profession cannot do and that is save people from being idiots. ↗

— Craig Ferguson

#doctors #god #illness #medical-establishment #pain

I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness- a real thorough-going illness. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#illness #sadness #equality

We are all hostages of time. We each have the same number of minutes and hours to live within a day, yet to me it didn't feel equally doled out. My illness brought me such an abundance of time that time was nearly all I had. My friends had so little time that I often wished I could give them what time I could not use. It was perplexing how in losing health I had gained something so coveted but to so little purpose. ↗

— Elisabeth Tova Bailey

#illness #time #equality

Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're "not at all like yourself but will be soon," but you know you won't. ↗

— Kay Redfield Jamison

#depression #illness #experience

[W]e need not become fixated upon our own suffering, whatever its origin. We offer it up, thus participating in the well-being of the universe. When we experience an illness or depression not as our own but as the universe’s, we are one with all beings who experience this kind of suffering. (78) ↗

— Jean-Yves Leloup

#depression #illness #suffering #well-being #experience

I didn't want this man touching me in those places. It wasn't that he was being inappropriate, it was just more that he obviously didn't view me as a person, let alone a scared person with actual feelings. He just saw me as yet another scientific specimen there for his own experimenting. I squeezed my eyes shut, cringing the entire time. ↗

— Jessica Verdi

#chronic-illness #dehumanization #doctors #hiv #experience