For me, school had been a Darwinian exercise. A daily attack of ridicule, abuse, and isolation.

There is no benefit in replacing certainty with doubt.

Actually, he hadn't just complained; she'd come home from school one afternoon and found him stabbing his paperback edition with a steak knife, the tip of the blade penetrating the cover and sinking...

By the time we hit the streets they were silent and closed in on us, and they had assumed the Nonchalant Look, an expression that said, I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor....

Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't.

Emptiness and boredom: what an understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair, and depression.

But when they were done, I wondered if there would be a next time. I felt good. I wasn't dead, yet something was dead. Perhaps I'd managed my peculiar objective of partial suicide. I was lighter,...

Work on the deficiencies you're most embarrassed by.

What I'm finding is that microdoses of LSD or mushrooms may be very helpful for depression because they make you feel better enough that you do something about what's wrong with your life. We've made...

To my embarrassment, I was crying again. Real girl tears for the second time, these ones born out of frustration. That didn't happen to me very often, but I hated it when it did. It was faulty wiring...

Third, you learn to make different explanations, called reattributions, and use them to dispute your automatic thoughts.

My sense of urgency is very simple,' said the professor, 'I've remembered that much. It's because what I have to remember has to do with time running out. And that's what anxiety is, in a lot of...

This work led cognitive therapists such as Aaron Beck, David D. Burns, and Albert Ellis to build treatment around the idea that our thoughts shape our emotions, not the other way around. By changing...

Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.

I didn't want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that's really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you're so relieved. I woke up...

A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talk show host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this....

As I've been alluding to, my one saving grace is distraction. It keeps me sane. It helps me cope, considering the length of time I've been performing this job. The trouble is, who could ever replace...

Leonard and Virginia married in August 1912. Virginia was 30. Soon after her marriage she suffered another breakdown and her mental health declined sporadically over the following year, culminating in...

Just a glass of beer, a piece of dry bread - and in one moment the brain is stronger, the mind is clearer and the will is firm! Phew, how utterly petty it all is!

It's amazing that the heart makes no noise when it cracks.

I smiled and I really felt at that moment that Judas and the Savior had met in me. And yet even this was not as real as my despairing sense that nothing was real for me again - unless, indeed, this...

I'm just tired and I can't sleep yet. A woman's work is never done, isn't that what the fools say?

You're not dead, but you're not alive, either. You're a wintergirl, Lia - Lia, caught in between the worlds. You're a ghost with a beat

there is a difference between denial and delusion. The difference is that denial is a fun game and delusion is pitiable and requires meds that you will be too delusional to enjoy.

Learn to take criticism seriously but not personally.

I have a room, which is in my brain, and it's very, very, very... untidy! There is stuff fallen everywhere. There are some very important ideas next to some very silly ones. There is a bottle of wine...

Given my heritage and the ordeal of my childhood, I sometimes wonder why I myself am not insane. Maybe I am.

In my hospital room, there was a constant comings and goings. Doctors, the head nurse, and her team of nurses in starched uniforms and rubber-soled shoes. Superficially, it seemed like history was...

The final therapy, as Freud said, is work and love.

It might have helped us considerably to have been shown, perhaps through some simple exercises in elementary school, that we are not our thoughts, that we can watch them come and go and learn not to...