Medication Quotes

“Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“One of the things that baffles me (and there are quite a few) is how there can be so much lingering stigma with regards to mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder. In my opinion, living with manic depression takes a tremendous amount of balls. Not unlike a tour of Afghanistan (though the bombs and bullets, in this case, come from the inside). At times, being bipolar can be an all-consuming challenge, requiring a lot of stamina and even more courage, so if you're living with this illness and functioning at all, it's something to be proud of, not ashamed of.
They should issue medals along with the steady stream of medication.”
― Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking

“Consumption can be a remedy against boredom and may convey a sense of fictitious power and supremacy, by standing out from the crowd through the extravagance of the expenditure. As it becomes an addiction, however, it might be cured, if the right medication is administered: humbleness and mindful discovery of the others. ( “Buying now, dying later” )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“It is mainly the soluble fiber in the common natural foods that lower cholesterol”
― Howard T. Joe M.S. Ph.D., Essential Guide to Treat Diabetes and to Lower Cholesterol

“Suddenly I wanted to get better. Mania wasn't fun anymore. It wasn't creative or visionary. It was mean parody at best, a cheap chemical trick. I needed to stop and get better. I'd take whatever they gave me, I pledged silently. I'd take Trilafon or Thorazine or whatever. I just wanted to sleep.”
― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family

“It's difficult. I take a low dose of lithium nightly. I take an antidepressant for my darkness because prayer isn't enough. My therapist hears confession twice a month, my shrink delivers the host, and I can stand in the woods and see the world spark.”
― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family

“I've been accustomed to mysteries, holy and otherwise, since I was a child. Some of us care for orphans, amass fortunes, raise protests or Nielsen ratings; some of us take communion or whiskey or poison. Some of us take lithium and antidepressants, and most everyone believes these pills are fundamentally wrong, a crutch, a sign of moral weakness, the surrender of art and individuality. Bullshit. Such thinking guarantees tradgedy for the bipolar. Without medicine, 20 percent of us, one in five, will commit suicide. Six-gun Russian roulette gives better odds. Denouncing these medicines makes as much sense as denouncing the immorality of motor oil. Without them, sooner or later the bipolar brain will go bang. I know plenty of potheads who sermonize against the pharmaceutical companies; I know plenty of born-again yoga instructors, plenty of missionaries who tell me I'm wrong about lithium. They don't have a clue.”
― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family

“Love is not enough. It takes courage to grab my father's demon, my own, or - God help me - my child's and strap it down and stop its mad jig; to sit in a row of white rooms filled with pills and clubbed dreamers and shout: stop smiling, shut up; shut up and stop laughing; you're sitting in hell. Stop preaching; stop weeping. You are a manic-depressive, always. your life is larger than most, unimaginable. You're blessed; just admit it and take the damn pill.”
― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family

“It is not depression or anxiety that truly hurts us. It is our active resistance against these states of mind and body. If you wake up with low energy, hopeless thoughts, and a lack of motivation - that is a signal from you to you. That is a sure sign that something in your mind or in your life is making you sick, and you must attend to that signal. But what do most people do? They hate their depressed feelings. They think" Why me? "They push them down. They take a pill. And so, the feelings return again and again, knocking at your door with a message while you turn up all the noise in your cave, refusing to hear the knocks. Madness. Open the door. Invite in depression. Invite anxiety. Invite self-hatred. Invite shame. Hear their message. Give them a hug. Accept their tirades as exaggerated mistruths typical of any upset person. Love your darkness and you shall know your light.”
― Vironika Tugaleva

“I mean, that's at least in part why I ingested chemical waste - it was a kind of desire to abbreviate myself. To present the CliffNotes of the emotional me, as opposed to the twelve-column read.
I used to refer to my drug use as putting the monster in the box. I wanted to be less, so I took more - simple as that. Anyway, I eventually decided that the reason Dr. Stone had told me I was hypomanic was that he wanted to put me on medication instead of actually treating me. So I did the only rational thing I could do in the face of such as insult - I stopped talking to Stone, flew back to New York, and married Paul Simon a week later.”
― Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking

“You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere.”
― William S. Burroughs, Junky

“At those times when I’m weak, needy, and depressed, I must remember there’s someone who feels worse. To that person, I would appear whole.”
― Larry Godwin, Transcending Depression: Quest Without a Compass

“I now know for certain that my mind and emotions, my fix on the real and my family's well-being, depend on just a few grams of salt. But treatment's the easy part. Without honesty, without a true family reckoning, that salt's next to worthless.”
― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family

“Ambien might have mentally just tossed my salad. WITH CROUTONS.”
― Jen Lancaster

“...someday..., we'll medicate human experience right out of the human experience.”
― Dennis Lehane, Shutter Island

“If you expand the boundaries of mental illness, which is clealry what has happened in this country during the past twenty-five years, and you treat the people so diagnosed with psychiatric medications, do you run the risk of turning an anger-ridden teenager into a lifelong mental patient?”
― Robert Whitaker, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America

“I was coming down off the last painkiller left in my dresser drawer after Autumn tossed my stash. In that moment I was so groggy and happy I would have accepted a date with Oscar the Grouch - and planned to do some serious feeling up on the green furry beast too. Yeah, stooping to pharmaceutical-inspired sex fantasies about garbage can Sesame Street characters - that had to be the best Just Say No drug lecture a girl in a leg cast could ever receive to make her go cold turkey off the meds.”
― Rachel Cohn, Cupcake

“Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Irony of the day: arthritis medication with a cap that old people can't get off, because of their arthritis.”
― Kelli Jae Baeli

“...all I could think about was how both sets of parents had needed to make their decision, on whether to medicate their child, in a scientific vacuum. (p. 35)”
― Robert Whitaker, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America

“Sebastian knows that his parents wish that something awful had happened to him. Because then there’d be a reason for him to hurt. Then he could be understood, maybe even fixed. But Sebastian’s darkness is not just a light switch that someone forgot to flip, not just a pill he doesn’t want to take. His darkness is a heaviness and a tiredness that pulls the bones of his chest inwards and downwards until he can’t breathe.”
― Fredrik Backman, Sebastian and the Troll

“If you feel comfortable enough to spill your guts to a stranger you pay per hour to do that with, then you'll be receptive to the idea of taking pharmaceutical dry ice with side effects that range from egregious to deadly.”
― stained hanes, 94,000 Wasps in a Trench Coat

“When the bubble still had tiny openings at the top they dropped down little pills, they said the pills were supposed to make the glass thinner but he thinks they might have misunderstood. He’s not sure they actually know as much about glass as they claim. The pills got stuck and blocked the last few openings. Now there’s only Sebastian in here.”
― Fredrik Backman, Sebastian and the Troll

“The only way I could get to sleep between my night shifts was to use sleeping tablets.”
― Steven Magee, Night Shift Recovery

“We take drug abuse very seriously, Lydia.”
Abuse? Use, surely. She was using it exactly as intended.”
― Eddie Robson, Drunk on All Your Strange New Words

“I had moments of lucidity. They were few, but I had them. Sometimes the drugs did work. But there were people who didn't get better, even with the medicine. What good is hospitalisation, then? To gather together the human debris.”
― Rodrigo de Souza Leão, All Dogs Are Blue

“Many children with behavioural issues are diagnosed with ADHD based on subjective symptoms, often without anyone asking about their sleep. They are medicated with powerful stimulant medications with potentially serious side effects.”
― Shereen Lim, Breathe, Sleep, Thrive: Discover how airway health can unlock your child’s greater health, learning, and potential

“MEDICATION IS AN incredibly attractive concept. Not just for the person with depression, or the person running a pharmaceutical firm, but for society as a whole. It underlines the idea we have hammered into us by the hundred thousand TV ads we have seen that everything can be fixed by consuming things. It fosters a just-shut-up-and-take-the-pill approach, and creates an “us” and “them” divide, where everyone can relax and feel “unreason” —to borrow Michel Foucault’s favorite word—is being safely neutered in a society that demands we be normal even as it drives us insane.”
― Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

“We need broader mood literacy and an awareness of tools that interrupt low mood states before they morph into longer and more severe ones. These tools include altering how we think, the events around us, our relationships, and conditions in our bodies (by exercise, medication, or diet).”
― Jonathan Rottenberg, The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic

“My veins were a cocktail of good intentions and bad decisions.”
― Daniel Ruczko, Pieces of a Broken Mind