Mental Health Struggles Quotes

I've had this terrible stomach problem for years, and that has made touring difficult. People would see me sitting in the corner by myself looking sick and gloomy. The reason is that I was trying to fight against the stomach pain, trying to hold my food down. People looked me and assumed I was some kind of addict.

All of the drama with my family and me and my mom and the separation between us and all that crazy stuff - I actually wrote about that. I have a song called 'Dear Mom,' and it's about the trials and tribulations with my mom, so I wrote about that and just everything that I've been through.

If I hadn't been a drunkard, I probably would have committed suicide long ago.

A quick glance at the American left reveals a movement in the midst of a nervous breakdown, displaying behavior that goes beyond inconsistency into the realm of bipolar moods and multiple personality disorders.

For people who feel things in an enormous way, it's pretty hard to live in this world.

I think it's just fear of death. I can't bear to go to sleep. There's very little, you know, between an entrepreneur and a crazy person.

I always try to avoid looking at the section where my books would be shelved, but I do know that my most reliable neighbor to the right is Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening', which is dispiriting. That's a book I don't want to re-read.

When I was into my 30s, I became increasingly depressed by rejection letters. I had had the feeling that by the time I was 30, I would be established. But I was not at all. By the time of 'Lives of Girls and Women,' I was into my 40s and I had become more thin-skinned.

'Downward Spiral' felt like I had an unending bottomless pit of rage and self-loathing inside me and I had to somehow challenge something or I'd explode. I thought I could get through by putting everything into my music, standing in front of an audience and screaming emotions at them from my guts.

I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.

Hatred is self-punishment.

Rather than setting yourself a New Year's resolution, why not simply pick a reason for hating yourself for the next 365 days? Takes less time, and it's easier to stick to.

Once a week, I like to slip into a deep existential depression where I lose all my sense of oneness and self-worth.

Vivien Leigh was a phenomenal actress, a very complicated woman, living on the edge of mental problems, haunted by demons and angels. And though I've never thought of myself like Marilyn Monroe, I was inspired by the tremendous risk she took - of being vulnerable.

There are some who praise a man free from disease; to me no man who is poor seems free from disease but to be constantly sick.

I've seen the hell these people go through.

My mother left behind three daughters when she went to America and started a new life. I certainly felt abandoned when my father died of a brain tumour; I felt he had abandoned me to this terrible, volatile mother and I had no protection.

I have a wonderful family. My father is a brilliant father, and my mother a brilliant person who had mental-health issues, but has been wonderfully creative throughout her life. They couldn't have been more supportive.

They're caught where there's no way out or where you can't see out. What are you going to do about it? I don't have the answer. If I did there would be no insane asylums.

I have a rat inside my skull that runs on a treadmill - pitta-patta pitta-patta pitta-patta. I enjoy the company of other people who experience that pitta-patta in their skulls.

Oddly, I believe that emotional proximity we feel to close loved ones makes it hard to be honest with them about feelings of depression.

My New Year's Eve is always 2 July, the night before my birthday. That's the night I make my resolutions. And this year scares the life out of me, because no matter how successful, how good things appear, there is always a deep core of failure within me, although I am trying to deal with it. My biggest fear, this coming year, is that I will be waking up alone. It makes me wonder how many bodies will be fished out of the Thames, how many decaying corpses will be found in one-room flats. I'm just being realistic.

I was poisoning myself with alcohol and medicating myself. I was trying to numb things. I was trying not to feel things, and that's ridiculous. It's one of the dumbest things you can do, because all you're doing is postponing the inevitable. Someday you'll have to look all those things in the eye rather than try to numb the pain.

The last thing I ever thought would ever happen to me was losing my legs.

I'm mostly a mess, and I hide it pretty well a lot of time.