You certainly can’t prevent all mental health problems – factors like genetics and traumatic life events certainly play a role. But everyone can take steps to improve their mental health and prevent further mental illness.
Most aid agencies do not even consider proposals to treat mental health problems; those that do think of it as a minor player, overshadowed by the pressing need to save lives by treating physical illness.
You become aware of an illness by understanding yourself and understanding the meaning that that illness has in your own life, symbolically and, more importantly, quite literally.
Like, everyone knows that we all need health care, but not only is it insanely expensive for most people in America, there are so many self-employed people who really struggle when faced with injury and disability and illness.
I think everyone in their life goes through challenges, whether it’s love or money, kids or illness… You have to really not run away from that stuff.
I’d had to cope with a lot of death and illness in my family from a young age, and that maybe gave me a bleak outlook on the world.
Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain.
I will alway support anybody being vocal about their mental illness, how they’re dealing with it, and how it affects them. And I’ll always support people waking up and paying attention to that.
I believe that all the important people in my life prior to 1982 were victimized by my illness.
I was very weak in my childhood, and arthritis took a toll on me. But my parents did everything in their might to help me recover. Slowly, I started recovering from the illness, and I made a pact with myself that I would not let my past dwell on my future.
I will say, in open adoption, all these choices you make about race, about the amount of mental illness you can deal with, about special needs and physical maladies, you have to lay all this out there before you know anybody’s story.
As individuals are best off believing they control their behaviour, the judiciary is best off imputing that control – barring powerful extenuating factors such as mental illness.
Just getting something in the books that makes sure people with mental illness and terrorists can’t get guns would be a good idea.
Mental illness affects everyone.
My story is how to have a life while dealing with mental illness, and I’ve had a life. I’ve been blessed. It’s been a different kind of life than what I planned on, but it’s been a good life nonetheless.
Not a lot of people know it, but I don’t have any qualms about saying it – there’s a lot of mental illness that runs in my family.
Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.
For me, ‘Angels in America’ is not really about AIDS. For me, it’s a metaphor for anybody who is struggling with serious illness or having to face their own demise. All of the characters face some form of destruction in themselves.
Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness, and yet so many Americans are left to fight this battle without the coverage, support, and resources they need.
America had taken my father from me. And over most of the years of his illness, I gradually started feeling this support system from this country who-people grieving along with us.
Serious illness doesn’t bother me for long because I am too inhospitable a host.
People who are in a position of finding out that they’re at risk for some illness, whether it’s breast cancer, or heart disease, are afraid to get that information – even though it might be useful to them – because of fears that they’ll lose their health insurance or their job.
One death is too many – and with careful management and a lot of luck, the coronavirus sweeping the globe will be curbed, in terms of illness and loss of life.
I’ve got asthma. When I was 17 I forgot to take my medication and was taken to a hospital for almost two weeks. After that I’ve taken better care of my illness.
Depression is an illness. It is not a ticket to genius. It is not an interesting personality quirk. It is horrible and all-consuming and really hurts.
When my mum first told me she got sick, I didn’t cry. I probably cried over my mum’s illness twice.
Have you ever thought about those last moments of your life? Nobody wants a long, lingering illness; nobody wants just that; but it would be nice if you could have a day or two where you know it’s coming.
Friends and family were convinced I was functioning just fine because I was efficient, productive and successful – who wouldn’t be working twenty hour days? I had everybody fooled with my illness.
As no one knew much about my mental illness, a lot of people had the attitude that I had the capability to ‘kick it’ and get better instantly. This was the most frustrating attitude for me.
Whether it’s someone struggling with mental illness, someone struggling with poverty or struggling with their own limitations in their social behaviors, for some reason, I’m drawn to characters like that.
I know that if I could really understand mental illness, then it would be appropriate to make a big career shift. I would become a therapist and a leader in terms of mental illness. But I’m not in the position.
Autism is a complicated illness, and children with a variety of treatments and non-treatments show improvement over time, which is all to the good.
I think that there’s a clinical mental illness called depression, but I believe that post-industrial America has been narcotized by progress. There’s a cultural malaise – mental illness or no – that everybody suffers from at some point in their life.
The first thing that happens to someone with a mental illness, in the throes of it, is that they lose all their self-esteem. They don’t think they fit in.
Illness, mechanicals, and injuries is not something you can 100% avoid; you can only try to limit the risk.
I know what mental illness looks like, and I know that if a person is not ready to get help, they won’t.
In fact, people with mental illness are more likely to be the victims of violence rather than anything else. So it’s important that we not stereotype folks with mental illness.
When you have a spinal or brain injury, or any kind of devastating illness, you kind of fall through the cracks in a sense. Your world implodes, and no one is really there to help pick up the pieces.
We cannot allow those with mental illness or record of hate or violence access guns and terrorize this country.
In childhood I developed a serious throat infection, and my heart stopped beating. I recovered from that illness with a voice that boomed forth like Kate Smith’s!
The more and more I spoke about it, the more I found out how many people deal with it, the more I read about it and researched it, the more you start to realize how many Americans deal with some sort of mental illness on a daily basis. That gave me comfort.
It’s a tricky thing to play mental illness or being connected to a higher sensibility.
We’re becoming so much better at destigmatizing all sorts of things, including mental illness in ‘Silver Linings.’
Without anxiety and illness I should have been like a ship without a rudder.
Early diagnosis is so important because the earlier a mental illness can be detected, diagnosed and treatment can begin, the better off that person can be for the rest of his or her life.
By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.
We have to be very conscious of the fact that beneath every illness is a prohibition. A prohibition that comes from a superstition.
Injuries aren’t anything foreign to me. I am used to overcoming illness and injury; you can’t complain about it. When you’re standing up there on the blocks, it doesn’t really matter: it’s all about the next minute.
Occupying my mind with complex problems has been my best and most powerful and most reliable defense against my mental illness.
I’ve always been aware of my health – when you are having to go on stage and perform, you need to be feeling good – but when I was diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, I became really, really conscious of my health.
As I kept having episodes of depression, I realized that it was not a one-off: that I had, well, not a disease, really – more an illness.
What is the natural reaction when told you have a hopeless mental illness? That diagnosis does you in; that, and the humiliation of being there. I mean, the indignity you’re subjected to. My God.
We have to realize that science is a double-edged sword. One edge of the sword can cut against poverty, illness, disease and give us more democracies, and democracies never war with other democracies, but the other side of the sword could give us nuclear proliferation, biogerms and even forces of darkness.
A transfer of money should never be involved in this profound situation. Although illness is profound, too, but medicine’s a business today. It’s a business.
There are scientists all around the world looking for the genes responsible for bipolar illness and major depression.
