We need to be open about mental illness, and demand the mental health services we need.
If people can talk about having breast cancer, why can't people who have mental illness talk about mental illness? Until we're able to do that, we're not going to be treated with the same kind of respect for our diseases as other people.
I don't think people talk about mental illness a lot, but they need to know it's OK to talk about how they are feeling. People are afraid of telling the truth because they think it's going to hurt everyone around them. I've kept so much inside that I've literally lost it. I wish more people would get help when they feel like they need it-- not just to look to medicine, but to the support of others.
I will alway support anybody being vocal about their mental illness, how they're dealing with it, and how it affects them. And I'll always support people waking up and paying attention to that.
You need community support. You're pretty defeated when you're laid low with a mental illness. It's a frightening place to be, and to get up and be able to stand and to move forward and to start functioning again, you need so much support. You need to feel you're not alone.
In the same way that we want to expand mental health service for people with mental illness, we also need to make sure that our police officers are getting the mental health help they need.
Wanting to be on television is a mental illness. Wanting to be president of the United States, wanting to be an actor - these are degrees of the same mental illness. If you need to be approved of simultaneously by more people than are in this room now, there's a problem.
The long-range sloution to high unemployment is to increase the incentive for ordinary people to save, invest, work, and employ others. We make it costly for employers to employ people; we subsidize people not to go to work We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
Not talking about mental illness is killing people. We need that to stop.
Mental illness is by far the most misunderstood, and stigmatized, of all afflictions. Statistically, one in three families in the U.S. deals with mental illness, and yet it's rarely discussed in the open. It's time for that to change.
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.
We know that mental illness is not something that happens to other people. It touches us all. Why then is mental illness met with so much misunderstanding and fear?
In fact, people with mental illness are more likely to be the victims of violence rather than anything else. So it's important that we not stereotype folks with mental illness.
I think mental illness or madness can be an escape also. People don't develop a mental illness because they are in the happiest of situations, usually. One doctor observed that it was rare when people were rich to become schizophrenic. If they were poor or didn't have too much money, then it was more likely.
I think people don't understand how intimately tied suicide is to mental illness, particularly to depressive illness and bipolar illness.
Mental illness is a disease and organic mental illness of young kids is becoming more and more of a disease... we do need to talk about it.