“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
“Two things can be true. You can love your family and have deep wounds as a result of your family experiences.” — Nedra Glover Tawwab
“What if you moved through the world as if you were easy to be loved? Because I promise you, you are easy to love.” Sonalee Rashatwar
“Take a deep breath to remember you are the child who lived through survival mode and the empowered adult who chose their healing.” — Dr. Nicole LePera
“‘Positive vibes only’ isn’t a thing. Humans have a wide range of emotions and that’s OK.” — Molly Bahr
“No amount of support or generosity justifies someone treating you badly. This includes parents.” — Sarah Crosby
I don’t regret opening up about what I went through [with depression], because, it sounds really cliché, but I have had women come up to me and say, ‘It meant so much to me.’ It means so much when you realize that someone was having a really hard time and feeling shame and was trying to hide this whole thing.” — Winona Ryder
“It’s my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other easily understood disease just to make it easier on me and also on them.” ― Jennifer Niven
“Change what you can, manage what you can’t.” ― Raymond McCauley
“Because wherever I sat — on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok — I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.” ― Sylvia Plath
“Mental health affects every aspect of your life. It’s not just this neat little issue you can put into a box.” — Shannon Purser
“Crazy isn’t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever.” ― Susanna Kaysen
“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.” — Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
“The acknowledgement of having suffered evil is the greatest step forward in mental health.” ― Stefan Molyneux
“I knew well enough that one could fracture one’s legs and arms and recover afterward, but I did not know that you could fracture the brain in your head and recover from that too.” ― Vincent van Gogh
“We are not our trauma. We are not our brain chemistry. That’s part of who we are, but we’re so much more than that.” ― Sam J. Miller
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” — Fredrick Douglass
“…we live in a world where if you break your arm, everyone runs over to sign your cast, but if you tell people you’re depressed, everyone runs the other way. That’s the stigma. We are so… accepting of any body part breaking down, other than our brains. And that’s ignorance. That’s pure ignorance. And that ignorance has created a world that doesn’t understand depression, that doesn’t understand mental health.” — Kevin Breel
“What people never understand is that depression isn’t about the outside; it’s about the inside.” ― Jasmine Warga
“The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain.” ― William Styron
“So many people look at [my depression] as me being ungrateful, but that is not it — I can’t help it. There’s not much that I’m closed off about, and the universe gave me all that so I could help people feel like they don’t have to be something they’re not or feel like they have to fake happy. There’s nothing worse than being fake happy.” — Miley Cyrus
“There is so much pain in the world, and most of these people keep theirs secret, rolling through agonizing lives in invisible wheelchairs, dressed in invisible bodycasts.” ― Andrew Solomon
