Mental Illness

Mental illness can happen to anybody. You can be a dustman, a politician, a Tesco worker... anyone. It could be your dad, your brother or your aunt.

Any other illness, any other disease that we're faced with, there's sympathy and understanding. We get help for those. With mental illness, our go-to is to categorize them as, 'Oh, they're crazy,' to belittle the problem.

Sometimes, patients with serious mental illness, just as with other serious medical illnesses, require hospitalization. In the absence of available public or private hospital beds, there are few options.

Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artefact of your mental illness.

Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.

We were never supposed to live until 40. We were built to self-destruct at 30, whether from cancer or mental illness. We're all going way beyond our expiration date.

The biggest advice I can give loved ones who are supporting someone navigating a newly diagnosed mental illness is patience, patience, and patience.

No further evidence is needed to show that 'mental illness' is not the name of a biological condition whose nature awaits to be elucidated, but is the name of a concept whose purpose is to obscure the obvious.

I know I'm not a self-indulgent idiot; I also know I'm not the second coming of Deepak Chopra. If I had believed either of those, or both, as some people do when they get famous, that's when the mental illness arrives.

It's my belief that, since the end of the Second World War, psychology has moved too far away from its original roots, which were to make the lives of all people more fulfilling and productive, and too much toward the important, but not all-important, area of curing mental 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.