We can all agree that no American should lose their life savings or their home because of illness or injury and that the rising cost of health care severely burdens individuals, families and businesses.
When FDR died in 1945, he was still paralyzed from the waist down. After he died, his portrait was put on the dime. Through his illness, he went out of his way to minimize his difficulties. Of the thousands of pictures taken of him, only two show him in a leg brace or a wheelchair.
Illness, especially chronic illness, can be very isolating. Not only does it limit how and when you can socialise, it causes you to feel unattractive.
We know Roger Ebert loved the ‘Sun-Times’ and his career as a newspaper columnist. But ironically, it was his illness and losing his voice that caused him to explore another venue.
We need employers to have an open mind about people with mental illness, and be willing to employ people, with the right support.
People are always selling the idea that people with mental illness are suffering. I think madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better.
What Americans desperately need is a way to transition from the current system – which is fragmented and focuses on high-cost, high-tech interventions after illness strikes – to a modern system that delivers coordinated, high-touch, lower-cost, patient-centered care with an emphasis on primary care and prevention.
At the time I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, my doctors told me that I had an incurable illness and they didn’t know much about it.
The ideas and practices of Franz Anton Mesmer, an 18th-century Australian healer, had spread to the United States and, by the 1840s, held the country in thrall. Mesmer proposed that everything in the universe, including the human body, was governed by a ‘magnetic fluid’ that could become imbalanced, causing illness.
‘Psychotherapy’ is a private, confidential conversation that has nothing to do with illness, medicine, or healing.
MS is not really a degenerative illness. It is not fatal, nor is it always progressive.
We enjoy a growing awareness and literacy around the symptoms of and remedies for mental illness. Thanks to brave public figures and persistent campaigners, much of the ignorance and stigma has been reduced.
Playing someone who has a mental illness, the responsibility to not stuff it up is really strong. You have to get it right. Not just for the people who are sufferers, but for the people who care about them – their loved ones.
I’ve always been interested in medicine and was pleased when my brother became a doctor. But after thinking seriously about that field, I realized that what intrigued me was not the science, not the chemistry or biology of medicine, but the narrative – the story of each patient, each illness.
Illness and problems are the specialties of life. But the death of a child is a cause of mental agony which can be overcome if one concedes this world to be a stage or stadium wherein praiseworthy are those who are not proud of their achievement and those who do not cry at their defeat.
While deficits are often inflationary and always pernicious, curing them by raising taxes is equivalent to curing an illness by shooting the patient.
Disability has become a form of permanent welfare for a lot of folks. It’s not that hard to prove a mental illness or mental issues or pain issues.
‘Empire’ deals with the black experience, the human experience, sibling rivalry, what it feels like to be ignored or doted upon by a parent, illness, death. There are so many things that I think the audience can identify with.
A major final to a tennis player is sacred ground. Short of any type of serious injury – soft-tissue tears, serious orthopedic injuries or a major illness like throwing up, dehydration or cramping – you keep going, especially in the final of a Slam.
The Stonewall riots were a key moment for gay people. Throughout modern history, gays had thought of themselves as something like a mental illness or maybe a sin or a crime. Gay liberation allowed us to make the leap to being a ‘minority group,’ which made life much easier.
Having a mental illness does not mean you’re weak or can’t handle life. You can have a mental illness and deal with it and still be a powerful, confident woman.
If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia.
When my father died, I was 21, and he’d been sick for a few years. He changed during his illness. He kind of softened during it.
There has been a lot of media attention around the dangers of drugs used to treat mental illness on the fetus.
Through my illness I learned rejection. I was written off. That was the moment I thought, Okay, game on. No prisoners. Everybody’s going down.
A man’s illness is his private territory and, no matter how much he loves you and how close you are, you stay an outsider. You are healthy.
Every crazy fad from the 1800s comes back or they never go away. It’s like fashion, like everything’s already been invented, and somebody stumbles onto it and people will always, always be looking for an answer for some vague illness they can’t get a diagnosis for.
Sometimes it takes a brush with eternity – a crash, an illness, some shock to the system – to get you really thinking about what you want to do with your limited time here, and why you’re living on this wobbling dirt clod in the first place.
The earliest sensation at the onset of illness, often preceding the recognition of identifiable symptoms, is apprehension. Something has gone wrong, and a glimpse of mortality shifts somewhere deep in the mind. It is the most ancient of our fears.
When you cry out in pain from a broken wrist, no one questions it. You just go to the hospital and take the necessary steps. Mental illness is just as real, even if it can’t be seen.
There are people with much bigger profiles than mine who are talking about mental illness. I am going to try to use whatever platform I have, whatever voice I have to help eliminate the stigma.
I don’t believe watching dreams but like to stick to reality. Reality is all about flood, hunger, illness.
Depression is a devastating illness, causing great suffering in the afflicted and anxiety to their nearest and dearest: it can hit at any age.
When a man is ill nothing is so important to him as his own illness.
I wanted to explore cancer not just biologically, but metaphorically. The idea that tuberculosis in the 19th century possessed the same kind of frightening and decaying quality was very interesting to me, and it seemed that one could explore the idea that every age defined its own illness.
Children certainly can’t learn if they’re dealing with trauma or mental illness.
Let us give publicity to H.I.V./AIDS and not hide it, because the only way to make it appear like a normal illness like TB, like cancer, is always to come out and say somebody has died because of H.I.V./AIDS, and people will stop regarding it as something extraordinary.
I have spent most of my life working with mental illness. I have been president of the world’s largest association of mental-illness workers, and I am all for more funding for mental-health care and research – but not in the vain hope that it will curb violence.
I don’t hide my feelings, but when it comes to illness, I guess I don’t panic. My father was the same way. I’m the provider for the family and the caretaker. If I panic, who is anybody going to run to?
I never imagined while going through this horrifying illness that I would write a book or that it could ever be a movie.
Aim to write for an hour per day. I used to be a teacher, and an hour a day before school was all it took for me to write my first book. Don’t get discouraged if a holiday or illness interrupts your writing habit. Just start it up again.
