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.

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

Mental illness" is among the most stigmatized of categories.' People are ashamed of being mentally ill. They fear disclosing their condition to their friends and confidants-and certainly to their employers.

A phenomenon that might seem only backwards or silly when expressed at a social level becomes madness at the individual level.

Mental illness turns people inwards. That's what I reckon. It keeps up forever trapped by the pain of our own minds, in the same way that the pain of a broken leg or a cut thumb will grab your attention, holding it so tightly that your good leg or your good thumb seem to cease to exist.