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

I am a woman with chronic schizophrenia. I have spent hundreds of days in psychiatric hospitals. I could have ended up living most of my life on a back ward, but things turned out quite differently.

Everyone becomes psychotic in his or her own ways.

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

Please hear this: There are not ‘schizophrenics,’ there are people with schizophrenia.

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.

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