Delve the transformative power of 100 mental illness quotes in raising awareness and fostering empathy, understanding, strength, and hope.
Mental illness is not a sign of weakness or personal failing; it is a legitimate health concern that requires support and caring. They are encompasse a range of conditions that impact to our emotions and behaviors, often significantly disrupting our daily lives.
In the face of this adversity, mental illness quotes provide a glimmer of understanding, empathy, and hope. Derived from various sources such as renowned psychologists, authors, or mental health advocates, the quotes offer diverse perspectives.
They provide a glimpse into the struggles, resilience, and triumphs of people navigating their mental health journeys. Whether you are seeking motivation or a deeper understanding of mental illness, these quotes offer valuable insights and reflections.
So, let us enjoy and relax as we delve into the world of mental illness quotes. May they inspire us, spark conversations, and foster a greater sense of compassion and support for those affected by mental health conditions.
Inspirational mental illness quotes

You can’t see the future coming not the terrors, for sure, but you also can’t see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light–soaked joy that await each of us.
John Green
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
Jack Kerouac
I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched.
Edgar Allan Poe
If you trade your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, and inexplicable grief.
Brené Brown
To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.
Jeanette Winterson
Unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life are not signs of mental illness, but of growing intelligence.
Ken Wilber
There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.
Matt Haig
Mental illness is a myth, whose function is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations.
Thomas Szasz
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
Marcus Aurelius
We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Dark mental illness quotes

For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people’s faces.
Osamu Dazai
Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Anyone who has actually been that sad can tell you that there’s nothing beautiful or literary or mysterious about depression.
Jasmine Warga
Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.
Edgar Allan Poe
The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.
John Green
Most people, if you live in a big city, you see some form of schizophrenia every day, and it’s always in the form of someone homeless. ‘Look at that guy – he’s crazy. He looks dangerous.’ Well, he’s on the streets because of mental illness. He probably had a job and a home.
Eric McCormack
Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.
Ray Bradbury
Our family suffers from a hereditary condition called, generally, mental illness. Specifically, multiple family members in successive generations have suffered from either bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.
Victor LaValle
I don’t find anything upsetting or gross or degrading about fighting with a mental illness: Bipolar or Schizophrenia.
Kangana Ranaut
You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.
Robin Williams
Overcoming mental illness quotes

Browse this section of poignant mental illness quotes. They provide hope and encouragement toward triumphs over mental health challenges.
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I will be stronger than my sadness.
Jasmine Warga
And every person can benefit from talking to somebody. I’m the most anti–medication person, but some people need medicine, and there was a time where I needed some too.
Miley Cyrus
Hope, hope, hope. It has to be there. Rob the person of hope, and there won’t be any recovery.
Dan Fisher
I cannot stand the words ‘Get over it.’ All of us are under such pressure to put our problems in the past tense. Slow down. Don’t allow others to hurry your healing. It is a process, one that may take years, occasionally, even a lifetime – and that’s OK.
Beau Taplin
Just because no one else can heal or do your inner work for you doesn’t mean you can, should, or need to do it alone.
Lisa Olivera
Be dedicated to change the way in which people see mental illness at all levels of society. If not for yourself, advocate for those who are struggling in silence.
Germany Kent
It doesn’t have to take over your life, it doesn’t have to define you as a person, it’s just important that you ask for help. It’s not a sign of weakness.
Demi Lovato
There’s not shame in dealing with these things. There’s no shame in having to fight everyday.
Jared Padalecki
It is not the the bruises on the body that hurt. It is the wounds of the heart and the scars on the mind.
Aisha Mirza
Mental illness is real quotes

Mental illness is real, and I got them. I don’t know if it’s the multiple concussions or the lifestyle choices.
Scott Hall
The war on drugs is very, very real, and the war on helping people with mental illness is very, very real.
Wendy Williams
Humanity is so weird. If we’re not laughing, we’re crying or running for our lives because monsters are trying to eat us. And they don’t even have to be real monsters. They could be the ones we make up in our heads. Don’t you think that’s weird?
T.J. Klune
People get really irritated by mental illness.
Maria Bamford
Mental illness, of course, is not literally a ‘thing’ – or physical object – and hence it can ‘exist’ only in the same sort of way in which other theoretical concepts exist.
Thomas Szasz
The concept of recovery is rooted in the simple yet profound realization that people who have been diagnosed with mental illness are human beings.
Patricia Deegan
I don’t suffer from a mental illness, I live with it.
David Feherty
I may be a lunatic, but then, wasn’t my lunacy caused by a monster that lurks at the bottom of every human mind? Those who call me a madman and spurn me may become lunatics tomorrow. They harbor the same monster.
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
When you are mad, mad like this, you don’t know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else’s reality, it’s still reality to you.
Marya Hornbacher
What happens to the wide–eyed observer when the window between reality and unreality breaks and the glass begins to fly?
Stephen King
Deep mental illness quotes

Nothing more isolating than a mental illness.
Hannibal
Crazy isn’t being broken, or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me, amplified.
Winona Ryder
What we call “normal” is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection, and other forms of destructive actions on experience…It is radically estranged from the structure of being.
R. D. Laing
I’m so good at beginnings, but in the end I always seem to destroy everything, including myself.
Kiera Van Gelder
After being hurt by the world so much, they began to see the demons within humans. So without hiding it through trickery, they worked to express it.
Osamu Dazai
The scariest thing of all is never knowing what you’re suddenly going to believe.
Neal Shusterman
I’m the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
Erich Fromm
But pain’s like water. It finds a way to push through any seal. There’s no way to stop it. Sometimes you have to let yourself sink inside of it before you can learn how to swim to the surface.
Katie Kacvinsky
You see demons in the eyes of the world, and the world sees a bottomless pit in yours.
Neal Shusterman
Mental illness quotes funny

If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
Thomas Szasz
As special as it is to listen to your friends argue over whether or not you have a mental illness, I’m starting to get the urge to go back to class.
Kendare Blake
If you don’t belong in a mental institution, you must be a very boring person.
Gala Siegel
I told my wife the truth. I told her I was seeing a psychiatrist. Then she told me the truth. She was seeing a psychiatrist, two plumbers and a bartender.
Rodney Dangerfield
The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept.
George Carlin
Psychiatrists urge me to take my tranquilizers. When I don’t, they become agitated. I take their pills to calm them down.
Brian Spellman
You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
Ursula K. Le Guin
They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.
Nathaniel Lee
Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.
Margaret Chittenden
Mental illness quotes short

Gain inspiration and hope from this section of short mental illness quotes. They will fostering your inner strength and perseverance to navigating of our mental health journeys.
In a mad world only the mad are sane.
Akira Kurosawa
I suppose our capacity for self–delusion is boundless.
John Steinbeck
A sick thought can devour the body’s flesh more than fever or consumption.
Guy de Maupassant
There is no such thing as mental illness, hence also no such thing as psychotherapy.
Thomas Szasz
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Henry David Thoreau
Part of being sane is being a little bit crazy.
Janet C. Long
My goal is to see that mental illness is treated like cancer.
Jane Pauley
Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, but stigma and bias shame us all.
William J. Clinton
There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn’t.
John Green
I will find a way out or make one.
Robert Peary
Loving someone with mental illness quotes
The beginning of anxiety is the end of faith, and the beginning of true faith is the end of anxiety.
George Muller
If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.
Henry Ford
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
Simone Weil
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.
Debra Lawrance
If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.
Maya Angelou
Don’t be disheartened when the people you love don’t see things like you do. There will be Pharisees in your life that will laugh it off, deny that it happened, or will mock your experience based on righteousness they think you don’t possess.
Shannon L. Alder
A lot of people are living with mental illness around them. Either you love one or you are one.
Mark Ruffalo
Love belongs to the people who feel they are not enough. Love belongs to the kids who grow up wondering why they’re different. Love belongs to the person reading this right now. Love is for everyone.
Erin Kingham
Recovering from the suicide of a loved one, you need all the help you can get.
Judy Collins
Don’t give up. Don’t give up on your story. Don’t give up on the people you love. Hope is real. Love is real. It’s all worth fighting for.
Jamie Tworkowski
Quotes about mental illness
Find comfort in these mental illness quotes. This section remind us that we are not alone in our struggles and that recovery are possible.
We must bring the issue of mental illness out into the sunlight, out of the shadow, out of the closet, deal with it, treat people, have centers where people can get the necessary help.
John Lewis
Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.
John Lennon
Thirty seconds of pure awareness is a long time, especially after a lifetime of escaping yourself at all costs.
Kiera Van Gelder
Mental health awareness means ending the stigma of mental illness by sharing the complexities of our stories and fighting to make care accessible to every family.
Michelle Wu
Occupying my mind with complex problems has been my best and most powerful and most reliable defense against my mental illness.
Elyn Saks
Dealing with chronic anxiety has taught me to better understand the nuances of mental illness and the very individual nature of it.
John Corey Whaley
Insane people are always sure they’re just fine. It’s only the sane people who are willing to admit they’re crazy.
Nora Ephron
The family unit is the institution for the systematic production of mental illness.
Ashley Montagu
We share in the certainty that people labeled with mental illness are first and above all, human beings. Our lives are precious and are of infinite value.
Patricia Deegan
The true definition of mental illness is when the majority of your time is spent in the past or future, but rarely living in the realism of NOW.
Shannon L. Alder
Positive mental illness quotes
Sometimes, you will go through awful trials in your life and then a miracle happens––God heals you.
Shannon L. Alder
My dark days made me strong. Or maybe I already was strong, and they made me prove it.
Emery Lord
I’m a happy–go–lucky manic–depressive. It does get very deep and dark for me, and it gets scary at times when I feel I can’t pull out of it. But I don’t consider myself negative–negative. I’m positive–negative.
Tim Burton
What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative–which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.
Sylvia Plath
I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship.
Amy March
If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
Frederick Douglas
Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.
Barbara Kingsolver
Nothing can dim the light that shines from within.
Maya Angelou
You are not your illness. You have an individual story to tell. You have a name, a history, a personality. Staying yourself is part of the battle.
Julian Seifter
Final thoughts
Mental illness quotes serve as a powerful tool to raise awareness, challenge stigmas, and the importance of self–care and support. They remind that you are not alone in your struggles and that experiences are valid.
Through mental illness quotes, we gain a deeper understanding and create an environment that promotes mental well–being. Let these mental illness quotes remind us that we all have a role to play in supporting and uplifting those affected by mental health conditions.
It is my sincere hope that you not only enjoy but also find resonance in the collection of mental illness quotes presented here. If you found these quotes helpful, share them with others who may benefit from their wisdom and perspective.
Remember, despite the difficulties you may face, know that there is hope for better days ahead. Always practice self–acceptance and celebrate the small victories as you continue to grow and evolve.
People are not defined by their mental illness but by their resilience, courage, and their capacity for growth. Keep going, keep moving forward, keep believing, and never lose hope.