Vikram Patel Quotes

Depression is a leading cause of ill health and disability, and many do not have access to mental health services and face significant social stigma around their disease.

Mental health is often missing from public health debates even though it's critical to wellbeing.

It's been taboo for so long to admit you had a mental health problem.

In India, there is a huge stigma attached to one having a mental illness; this not only makes it worse for the sufferer but also for their caregivers.

Everyone knows someone who is struggling with a mental health issue, whether it's depression, trauma or substance abuse. It affects everyone, so we all have a stake in making sure good treatment is available.

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

One day, I made a remark that I might work with people with mental illness, and somebody in the press heard it, and it was in the paper. And the more I thought about it and found out about it, the more I thought it was just a terrible situation with no attention. And I've been working on it ever since.

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.

The strongest predictor of unhappiness is anyone who has had a mental illness in the last 10 years. It is an even stronger predictor of unhappiness than poverty - which also ranks highly.

I want to show that the dividing lines between sanity and mental illness have been drawn in the wrong place.

Mental health needs a great deal of attention. It's the final taboo and it needs to be faced and dealt with.

The fact is, psychiatric help is not widely available to CIA agents - and as in the military, there is a stigma attached to admitting post-traumatic stress.

I think that every young person is a little mentally ill, you know? If we're not totally shutting down, we're all a little bit mentally ill in our twenties and maybe into our early thirties.

One in six people suffer depression or a chronic anxiety disorder. These are not the worried well but those in severe mental pain with conditions crippling enough to prevent them living normal lives.

People take the mickey out of mental health, but it is very delicate.

The vast majority of people who have mental illness problems never hurt anybody.

One of things so bad about depression and bipolar disorder is that if you don't have prior awareness, you don't have any idea what hit you.

You know, ever since man had any notion that some of his other people, his colleagues, could be different, could be strange, could be severely depressed or what we now recognize as schizophrenia, he was certain that this kind of illness had to come from evil spirits getting into the body.

If you look at suicides, most of them are connected to depression. And the mental health system just fails them. It's so sad. We know what to do. We just don't do it.

We expect well-informed treatment for cancer or heart disease; it matters no less for depression.

Several politicians and wives of politicians have been public about their experiences with depression or bipolar illness, including Lawton Chiles, Patrick Kennedy, Tipper Gore and Kitty Dukakis. Each made a tremendous difference by doing so.

I read an article somewhere that stated 1 in 4 American women will be considered clinically depressed in their lifetime. This should be more than a gold mine for pharmaceutical companies - it should be a wake-up call.

For too long we have swept the problems of mental illness under the carpet... and hoped that they would go away.

Washington is riddled with unstable people who are either depressed or make other people depressed.

Treating mental health illness is compassionate and saves money.