Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel says we are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember. Who am I, then, if my memory is impaired?

Many people say that psychiatrists just want to push drugs. Well I seriously have to say, without medication, I’d be locked up in a VA hospital somewhere.

There will always be people afraid of the monsters in the night. They are usually the ones that look for them because they have proven they exist in themselves.

It is painful for the plant which is myself to live in the atmosphere and light of this world. Somewhere an element is lacking which would permit me to continue.

A string of thoughts run through my head like a song I can't get rid of, over and over in the same order: I am broken. I am a fraud. I am impossible to love.

It took me far too long to realize that lost years and relationships cannot be recovered. That damage done to oneself and others cannot always be put right again.

What to do with life? Get out of bed, Derek. That’s what you do. You get out of bed, and you get yourself a cup of fucking coffee. That’s all you can do.

It's amazing the things that the heart and mind can endure. No one ever told me that growing up, so I often spent my childhood thinking something was wrong with me.

My brain sometimes departs from the agreed-upon reality, and my private reality is a very lonely place. But in the end, I'm not sure I wish I'd never gone there.

The horror of the Pit lay in the emergence from it, with the return of her will, her caring, and her feeling of the need for meaning before the return of meaning itself.

You're surrounded by people and voices and noises, but there you are, alone and trembling inside. And you want to be invisible. (thinking) Please, don't notice me.

The neurologist had dismissed her case after a single visit, handing out an easy nostrum by telling her father that if she continued to write poetry, she would be all right.

Why, when you have a mental disease, is it always considered an act of imagination? Why is it that every organ in your body can get sick and you get sympathy except the brain?

If you trade your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, and inexplicable grief.

I could think of nothing but the loneliness, of being stuck in that glass room with only OCD for company. OCD, the bully; OCD, the oppressor; OCD, the destroyer of lives; OCD.