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

We must stop criminalizing mental illness. It's a national tragedy and scandal that the L.A. County Jail is the biggest psychiatric facility in the United States.

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.

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

No one would ever say that someone with a broken arm or a broken leg is less than a whole person, but people say that or imply that all the time about people with mental illness

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

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