Mental illness leaves a huge legacy, not just for the person suffering it but for those around them.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Those who become mentally ill often have a history of chronic pain.
Mental health needs a great deal of attention. It's the final taboo and it needs to be faced and dealt with.
I think one thing is that anybody who's had to contend with mental illness - whether it's depression, bipolar illness or severe anxiety, whatever - actually has a fair amount of resilience in the sense that they've had to deal with suffering already, personal suffering.
A lot of people are living with mental illness around them. Either you love one or you are one.
It's my belief that, since the end of the Second World War, psychology has moved too far away from its original roots, which were to make the lives of all people more fulfilling and productive, and too much toward the important, but not all-important, area of curing mental illness.
Playing someone who has a mental illness, the responsibility to not stuff it up is really strong. You have to get it right. Not just for the people who are sufferers, but for the people who care about them - their loved ones.
I had known a couple of people in college who went off the rails, who had significant bouts with mental illness.
Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artefact of your mental illness.
The vast majority of people who have mental illness problems never hurt anybody.
Any other illness, any other disease that we're faced with, there's sympathy and understanding. We get help for those. With mental illness, our go-to is to categorize them as, 'Oh, they're crazy,' to belittle the problem.