Stigma against mental illness is a scourge with many faces, and the medical community wears a number of those faces.

The schizophrenic mind is not so much split as shattered. I like to say schizophrenia is like a waking nightmare.

My mind has been both my best friend and my worst enemy.

One of the reasons the doctors gave for hospitalizing me against my will was that I was ‘gravely disabled.’ To support this view, they wrote in my chart that I was unable to do my Yale Law School homework. I wondered what that meant about much of the rest of New Haven.

Occupying my mind with complex problems has been my best and most powerful and most reliable defense against my mental illness.

Some people still hold [the] view that restraints help psychiatric patients feel safe. I've never met a psychiatric patient who agreed.

Portray [people with mental illness] sympathetically, and portray them in all the richness and depth of their experience as people, and not as diagnoses.