Nervous Breakdown Quotes

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.

I wish I wrote the way I thought Obsessively Incessantly With maddening hunger I’d write to the point of suffocation I’d write myself into nervous breakdowns Manuscripts spiralling out like tentacles into abysmal nothing And I’d write about you a lot more than I should

Girls think they’re only allowed to wear dresses on formal occasions, but I like a woman who says, you know, I’m going over to see a boy who is having a nervous breakdown, a boy whose connection to the sense of sight itself is tenuous, and gosh dang it, I am going to wear a dress for him.

If you're born in a cubicle and grow up in a corridor, and work in a cell, and vacation in a crowded sun-room, then coming up into the open with nothing but sky over you might just give you a nervous breakdown.

I feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.

If I had a nervous breakdown every time something awful happened in the world, I'd be crazier than a shithouse rat.

Most of you guys can't see the potential in a nervous breakdown. A real collapse. There's more chance of finding yourself in a major depression than there is in a bottle Prozac.

Even when I took the drugs I realized that this just wasn't fun anymore. The drugs had become a part of my routine. Something to wake me up. Something to help me sleep. Something to calm my nerves. There was a time when I was able to wake up, go to sleep, and have fun without a pill or a line to help me function. These days it felt like I might have a nervous breakdown if I didn't have them.

How do you know? How best to ensure his nervous breakdown?" I ask. "Keep going," Christian says. "Just go on as if nothing has happened. We all hate that.

The girls in California were probably prettier in a standard sense than the New York girls--blonder and in better health, I guess; but I still preferred the way the girls in New York looked--stranger and more neurotic (a girl always looked more beautiful and fragile when she was about to have a nervous breakdown).

If you want to give the devil a nervous breakdown, just get up every day and see how much good you can do.

What are you going to have?” he asked. “A nervous breakdown,” she muttered and opened her menu. So we’ll tell the waitress to make that a double, he thought.

Do more than:Stop self-destructing. Save each other. Not have a nervous breakdown or six by twenty five. Decolonize our minds, our hair, our hearts. Transform into the phoenixes we were all meant to be.

Nobody gets their period for the first time and has a nervous breakdown next to a Kohler toilet. Men have such stupid ideas about menstruation, don’t they, Julie?

In fact that is why the lives of most women are so vaguely unsatisfactory. They are always doing secondary and menial things (that do not require all their gifts and ability) for others and never anything for themselves. Society and husbands praise them for it (when they get too miserable or have nervous breakdowns) though always a little perplexedly and half-heartedly and just to be consoling. The poor wives are reminded that that is just why wives are so splendid -- because they are so unselfish and self-sacrificing and that is the wonderful thing about them! But inwardly women know that something is wrong. They sense that if you are always doing something for others, like a servant or nurse, and never anything for yourself, you cannot do others any good. You make them physically more comfortable. But you cannot affect them spiritually in any way at all. For to teach, encourage, cheer up, console, amuse, stimulate or advise a husband or children or friends, you have to be something yourself. [...]"If you would shut your door against the children for an hour a day and say; 'Mother is working on her five-act tragedy in blank verse!' you would be surprised how they would respect you. They would probably all become playwrights.

A nervous breakdown waits around the corner for anyone who lets himself wallow in bitterness. Little by little, it takes over your whole being.

I am fearful of romantic dinners, huge crowds, dusk - of normal things- afraid to be loved, the one thing I want most. Maybe it's because I don't think I deserve it because I am not that perfect little girl that I was supposed to be, well manicured and well groomed, because I have nervous breakdowns, and take pills, and keep moving on.

I'd have a nervous breakdown except that I've been through this too many times to be nervous.

T. S. Eliot taught us you can write about your nervous breakdown, but call it 'The Wasteland' and make it big and crazy enough to hide behind.

When tears come, I breathe deeply and rest. I know I am swimming in a hallowed stream where many have gone before. I am not alone, crazy, or having a nervous breakdown . . . My heart is at work. My soul is awake.

Neil should let it go, but he needed to understand. "Why not?" "Because you're too stupid to tell me no," Andrew said. "And you don't want me to tell you yes?" "This isn't yes. This is a nervous breakdown. I know the difference even if you don't." Andrew dug his thumb into his lower lip like he could erase the weight of Neil's mouth and fixed his stare on the horizon. "I won't be like them. I won't let you let me be." Neil opened his mouth, closed it, and tried again. "The next time one of them says you're soulless I might have to fight them." "Ninety-two percent," Andrew said, "going on ninety-three.

What about James?” “James? James, the guy I work with? James who takes ice cream scooping more seriously than anyone should? James who almost had a nervous breakdown when the chocolate and rainbow sprinkles accidentally got mixed together? That James?” “He has a good work ethic. And he’s cute.” “Hello, I’m not thirty. I don’t want a good work ethic yet. I just want someone who can form complete sentences.

Come on, there's no one there. You want coffee?" Tess asked. "Yeah, sure, why not? I'm only on the brink of a nervous breakdown. I don't imagine why caffeine wouldn't help this situation.

There had been talk of cutting Luke from Trigon, but then everyone on Luke’s team had wept and had nervous breakdowns at the idea of cutting Luke from Trigon, so nobody talked about it anymore.

The reality was that the United States in 2017 was tethered to the words and actions of an emotionally overwrought, mercurial and unpredictable leader. Members of his staff had joined to purposefully block some of what they believed were the president’s most dangerous impulses. It was a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world.

People suffering nervous breakdowns often do a lot of research, to find explanations for what they are undergoing. the research, of course fails.

As soon as this day’s over, I plan on having a nervous breakdown. Feel free to leave me the fuck alone, or you’ll be pulled in with me. On the plus side, there’ll be ice cream, so it won’t be all bad.

I have long convinced myself that the piano is like a drug, seductive and strong, and it can mess you up, it can awaken dead emotions, it can drown you in your lost selves. It is a nervous breakdown waiting to happen.

The bar staff and croupiers all wore black with the same green triangle logo emblazoned on their shirts, and contact lenses which made their eyes shine an eerie, vibrant green. The bar optics glowed with the same green light, the intensity of which was linked to the music. As the bartender walked away to fetch the drinks, a breakdown in the techno track commenced and the bottles began to palpitate. The bartender's eyes glowed with a hallucinatory felinity that made Mangle feel nervous.

Whenever we doubt our own ability to achieve, it is worthwile pondering the obstacles that others have overcome. To name a few... *Napoleon overcame his considerable handicap, his tiny stature, to lead his conquering armies across Europe. *Abraham Lincon failed in business aged 31, lost a legislative race and 32, again failed in business at 34, had his sweetheart die when he was 35, had a nervous breakdown at 36, lost congressional races aged 43, 46 and 48, lost a senatorial race at 55, failed in his efforts to become vice president of the U.S.A aged 56 and lost a further senatorial contest at 58. At 60 years of age he was elected president of the U.S.A and is now remembered as one of the great leaders in world history. *Winston Churchill was a poor student with a speech impediment. Not only did he win a Nobel Prize at 24, but he became one of the most inspiring speakers of recent times. It is not where you start that counts, but where you choose to finish.

You better stop Look around Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes, here it comes Here comes your nine-teenth nervous breakdown.

One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important. —BERTRAND RUSSELL W

You know what she said? She says nobody gets a nervous breakdown just from the war and all. She says you probably were unstable like, your whole goddam life.

Some logics get nervous breakdowns. Overloaded phone system behaves like frightened child. Mike did not have upsets, acquired sense of humor instead. Low one. If he were a man, you wouldn't dare stoop over. His idea of thigh-slapper would be to dump you out of bed — or put itch powder in pressure suit.

I don't mean that creative people are somehow finer, or more sensitive, and thus have finer, more sensitive nervous breakdowns - you can save that horseshit for the Sylvia Plath worshipers. It's just that creative people have creative breakdowns.

I'm going over to see a boy who is having a nervous breakdown, a boy whose connection to the sense of sight itself is tenuous, and gosh dang it, I am going to wear a dress for him.

That's the spirit! Make it chicken broth or nothing. That's putting the old foot down. If she's determined to have a nervous breakdown, the least we can do is see that she doesn't have it in peace.

Horselover Fat's nervous breakdown began the day he got the phone call from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals.

I’ve had boyfriends before, and frankly, each one was a disappointment. There was nothing horribly wrong with these boys. It was my fault. I’m kind of a snob when it comes to guys. So far, the biggest problem with the boys I’ve dated is that they weren’t too smart. And eventually I ended up hating myself for being with them. It scared me, trying to pretend I was something I wasn’t. I could see how easily it could be done, and it made me realize that was what most of the other girls were doing as well—pretending. If you were a girl, you could start pretending in high school and go on pretending your whole life, until, I suppose, you imploded and had a nervous breakdown, which is something that’s happened to a few of the mothers around here. All of a sudden, one day something snaps and they don’t get out of bed for three years.

exI feel unspeakably lonely. And I feel - drained. It is a blank state of mind and soul I cannot describe to you as I think it would not make any difference. Also it is a very private feeling I have - that of melting into a perpetual nervous breakdown. I am often questioning myself what I further want to do, who I further wish to be; which parts of me, exactly, are still functioning properly. No answers, darling. At all.

I have always let you know how much I care, right? You never had to wonder. I'm not a man for words. Daddy showed me that you 'do' for a woman. Remember that time when you damn near had a nervous breakdown because it looked like the hickory-nut tree in the front yard was thinking about dying? Where I'm from, we don't believe in spending money on pets, let alone trees. But I couldn't bear to see you fret, so I hired a tree doctor. See, in my mind, that was a love letter.

And finally, count your blessings. You got through college. You didn’t commit suicide, O.D., or have a nervous breakdown, and let’s remember the ones who did. It’s time to get busy. It’s your turn to cause trouble.

a synonym for ‘insane’ is ‘bananas

People I don't know die all the time. If I had a nervous breakdown every time something awful happened in the world I'd be crazier than a shithouse rat.

I wish I wrote the way I thought; obsessively, incessantly, with maddening hunger. I'd write to the point of suffocation. I'd write myself into nervous breakdowns, manuscripts spiralling out like tentacles into abysmal nothing...

Come on. Let’s go and sit down. I need to have a beer and a nervous breakdown.” “Talk first, then breakdown. I want answers, not drool.” “You used to love my drool.” “Ha. You funny.

To get out of depression, you need to find your exotic connection.

Mahmoud, sir. No, Doctor Mahmoud is not well. A—a slight nervous breakdown, sir.” Van Tromp reflected that being dead drunk was the moral equivalent thereof.

I’m going over to see a boy who is having a nervous breakdown, a boy whose connection to the sense of sight itself is tenuous, and gosh dang it, I am going to wear a dress for him.

I wonder if anyone feels as though they're the same person they seem to remember. It would make them have a nervous breakdown. It probably wouldn't even make sense. I don't know if this is enough. I don't know what anybody else has told you.

Look" I narrowed my eyes at Mr. Gorgeous. "I'm kind of in the middle of a nervous breakdown and after that I plan on having a very festive pity party, table for one, so unless you are here to put me out of my misery I suggest you scurry on your way.

Under the Volcano” embraces everything from Dante to Freud to the cabala. Here it shambles like Cervantes, there it rages like Ahab, and every page of it pulsates on Out of Body Auto-Reply, that style of pure Lowry that points at once backward, to all European literature, and forward, to the mother of all nervous breakdowns.

Girls think they're only allowed to wear dresses on formal occasions, but I like a woman who says, you know, I'm going over to see a boy who is having a nervous breakdown, a boy whose connection to the sense of sight itself is tenuous, and gosh dang it, I am going to wear a dress for him.

One stifling summer afternoon last August, in the attic of a tiny stone house in Pennsylvania, I made a most interesting discovery: the shortest, cheapest method of inducing a nervous breakdown ever perfected. In this technique..., the subject is placed in a sharply sloping attic heated to 340 F and given a mothproof closet known as the Jiffy-Cloz to assemble.

As you and I march across the decades of time, we are going to meet a lot of unpleasant situations that are so. They cannot be otherwise. We have our choice. We can either accept them as inevitable and adjust ourselves to them, or we can ruin our lives with rebellion and maybe end up with a nervous breakdown.

He is a monk. On his card it says INNER PEACE CENTER. I will go there in February for a tea ceremony. Does he actually know more than I do about inner peace? If he met my relatives, would he have a nervous breakdown? What about his relatives? Do they drive him nuts? The truth is everybody gets on everybody's nerves.

I want to know if one of the reasons I sometimes feel like I am on the brink of a breakdown is partly because the world sometimes seems on the brink of a breakdown.

Serafina was late for dinner because her emotional robots had been having a nervous breakdown.

Sidetracked women, who scatter their energies to the four winds, never achieve serenity. (Nervous breakdowns, to be sure, but not serenity.) It’s as simple as that.

You can't rest in the shade of a human, not even a roly-poly one; and isn't it refreshing that trees can undergo periodic change without having a nervous breakdown over it?

What is the atomic bomb?” queried Leslie, “But a mass of tortured Elements suffering complete nervous breakdown?” I shuddered at the thought.

One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important, and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster. If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.

You look nice,” he said. I was wearing this just-past-the-knees dress I’d had forever. “Girls think they’re only allowed to wear dresses on formal occasions, but I like a woman who says, you know, I’m going over to see a boy who is having a nervous breakdown, a boy whose connection to the sense of sight itself is tenuous, and gosh dang it, I am going to wear a dress for him.

Let me share a famous life history with you. This was a man who failed in business at the age of twenty-one; was defeated in a legislative race at age twenty-two; failed again in business at age twenty-four; had his sweetheart die when he was age twennty-six; had a nervous breakdown at age twenty-seven; lost a congressional race at age thirty-four; lost a senatorial race at age forty-five; failed in an effort to become vice-president at age forty-seven; lost a senatorial race at age forty-nine; and was elected president of the United States at age fifty-two. This man was Abraham Lincoln.

Only adults had nervous breakdowns in those days, so the methods of survival for boys who refused to join the system were animal cunning, “internal immigration” as the Germans call it, or simply getting the hell out. I practised the first two, then opted for the third and took myself to Switzerland.

We were all young once. And we had our nervous breakdowns and our cancers and our heartbreaks and our anger and we hid them and pretended they didn’t exist and we moved on because everyone said we should. And we’re not one iota better for it. Not one. Let them have this. Just this. Let them be tender, Walter.

Before New York, the cracks were already there, but now they began to split open and gape, and the difference between how a thing or a place or a person appears and the reality becomes alarmingly visible, garish.

In the meantime, though my kiss-stung face has returned to normal, my heart and all working body parts are absolutely not normal. Because every time Porter so much as even walks within ten feet of me at work, I have the same reaction. Four knocks on Hotbox door? I flush. Scent of coconut in the break room? I flush. Sound of Porter cracking jokes with Pangborn in the hallway? I flush. And every time this happens, Grace is there like some taunting Greek chorus, making a little mmm-hmmnoise of confirmation. Even Pangborn notices. “Are you ill, Miss Rydell?” “Yes,” I tell him in the break room one day before work. “I’m apparently very ill in the worst way. And I want you to know that I didn’t plan for this to happen. This was not part of my plan at all. If you want to know the truth, I had other plans for the summer!” I think of my boardwalk map, lying folded and abandoned in my purse. Pangborn nods slowly. “I have no idea what you mean, but I support it completely.” “Thank you,” I tell him as he walks away, whistling. Half a minute later, Porter pulls me into a dark corner of the hallway, checks around the corner, and kisses the bejesus out of me. “That’s me, destroying all your other plans,” he says wickedly. And if I didn’t know any better, I’d think he sounds jealous. Then he walks away, leaving me all hot and bothered. I’m going to have a nervous breakdown.

If you’re born in a cubicle and grow up in a corridor, and work in a cell, and vacation in a crowded sun-room, then coming up into the open with nothing but sky over you might just give you a nervous breakdown. They make the children come up here once a year, after they’re five. I don’t know if it does any good. They don’t get enough of it, really, and the first few times they scream themselves into hysteria. They ought to start as soon as they’re weaned and have the trip once a week.

Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Albert Einstein didn’t speak until he was four years old and was considered not very bright. Oprah Winfrey was demoted from a news anchor job because she was thought to be unfit for television. Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper for lacking imagination. Thomas Edison was called stupid by his teachers. The Beatles were told they didn’t have a great sound and rejected by Decca Recording Studios. Dr. Suess was rejected by twenty-seven publishers. Abraham Lincoln had a long list of failures, including eight election losses and a nervous breakdown.

Subjective matter of opinion, Gaal. If you’re born in a cubicle and grow up in a corridor, and work in a cell, and vacation in a crowded sun-room, then coming up into the open with nothing but sky over you might just give you a nervous breakdown.

And, in my opinion, that's one of the reasons why you're having this little nervous breakdown. And especially the reason why you're having it at home. This place is made to order for you. The service is good, and there's plenty of cold running ghosts.

Sadly but, perhaps, not altogether unexpectedly this society has had very limited success in achieving what is supposed to be the justification for its existence-- the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest possible number of people. In so far as its citizens are saved from the major anxieties and responsibilities which normally surround the business of being a man, they transfer what appears to be an unvarying human capacity for worry to the most trivial things, making mountains out of molehills on a vast scale; and they have 'nervous breakdowns' over problems which men and women living under sterner conditions would hardly find time to notice.

I kept waiting for this momentous breakdown, with everything crashing down in some spectacular show. What I didn't recognize, is that all along I had been crumbling slowly and quietly, like unfired clay. It's almost boring how unspectacular it is. Nothing earth shattering happened, in fact that's the problem; day after day nothing happens. You just feel incapable, unfocused, disorganized, and defeated. Make some strong coffee and get to work. You're not alone.

This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence - to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.

Hey,” Finn said, glancing over his shoulder. He had the end of a paintbrush clenched between his teeth. “You’re just in time.” “For what?” she asked as she slipped inside. “My nervous breakdown,” Finn said with a wry smile, dropping his paintbrush onto the easel’s shelf. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and sat down on an old garden bench that was pushed up against the wall. “I suck. Did you know that you are in the presence of a person who completely and utterly sucks?

Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it's almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn't like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line. There's a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned; there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there's no longer anybody to tell them what to do. There wouldn't be enough Kool-Aid to go round. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang—which is the most favored city in the country—every night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It's 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn't moved in years; it's a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. 'Under construction,' say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradiction for now.

john stuart mill knew several languages, advanced math and read many great books' before he was ten years old. his father taught him. in his early twenties he had a nervous breakdown and didn't leave his bed for three years. he read poetry and at started to feel better. he was a feminist and cared about human rights. five people went to his funeral

Where do you go when your body is broken? Who can you call on when your mind is shattered into a thousand pieces, your skin is on fire and your soul lies crumpled on the floor?

If I had a nervous breakdown every time something awful happened in the world, I’d be crazier than a shithouse rat.

Hasn’t everyone taken a nervous breakdown at some point? Maybe I suffered a nervous breakthrough. I don’t know what to think. It echoes inside your skull.

I am petrified in my dreams and I am petrified in reality because it is as if my dreams are reality and I am having a nervous breakdown and I have nowhere to turn. Nowhere. My mother, I sense, has just kind of given up on me, decided that she isn’t sure how she raised this, well, this thing, this rock-and-roll girl who has violated her body with a tattoo and a nose ring, and though she loves me very much, she no longer wants to be the one I run to. My father has never been the one I run to. We last spoke a couple of years ago. I don’t even know where he is. And then there are my friends, and they have their own lives. While they like to talk everything through, to analyze and hypothesize, what I really need, what I’m really looking for, is not something I can articulate. It’s nonverbal: love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on. And I know it’s around me somewhere, but I just can’t feel it.

A common and traditionally masculine marital problem is created by the husband who, once he is married, devotes all his energies to climbing mountains and none to tending to his marriage, or base camp, expecting it to be there in perfect order whenever he chooses to return to it for rest and recreation without his assuming any responsibility for its maintenance. Sooner or later this “capitalist” approach to the problem fails and he returns to find his untended base camp a shambles, his neglected wife having been hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, having run off with another man, or in some other way having renounced her job as camp caretaker. An equally common and traditionally feminine marital problem is created by the wife who, once she is married, feels that the goal of her life has been achieved. To her the base camp is the peak. She cannot understand or empathize with her husband’s need for achievements and experiences beyond the marriage and reacts to them with jealousy and never-ending demands that he devote increasingly more energy to the home. Like other “communist” resolutions of the problem, this one creates a relationship that is suffocating and stultifying, from which the husband, feeling trapped and limited, may likely flee in a moment of “mid-life crisis.” The women’s liberation movement has been helpful in pointing the way to what is obviously the only ideal resolution: marriage as a truly cooperative institution, requiring great mutual contributions and care, time and energy, but existing for the primary purpose of nurturing each of the participants for individual journeys toward his or her own individual peaks of spiritual growth. Male and female both must tend the hearth and both must venture forth. As an adolescent I used to thrill to the words of love the early American poet Ann Bradstreet spoke to her husband: “If ever two were one, then we.”20 As I have grown, however, I have come to realize that it is the separateness of the partners that enriches the union. Great marriages cannot be constructed by individuals

Augustus glanced away from the screen ever so briefly. “You look nice,” he said. I was wearing this just-past-the-knees dress I’d had forever. “Girls think they’re only allowed to wear dresses on formal occasions, but I like a woman who says, you know, I’m going over to see a boy who is having a nervous breakdown, a boy whose connection to the sense of sight itself is tenuous, and gosh dang it, I am going to wear a dress for him.

I didn’t know what it meant to have a nervous breakdown. I’d heard people jokingly exaggerate that they’d had one. Until that moment on my bathroom floor, I had no concept. Then the frayed strands of my sanity that I’d fought so hard to keep together snapped in two, and I started to free fall into chaos. First, I screamed. I screamed and I screamed until I was hoarse. Then my screams turned over to cries of agony. Pain, both physical and emotional, consumed me. Will tried to console me, but it was useless. He panicked and called my parents. When they heard my sobs in the background, they told him to call the paramedics. So he did. By the time they arrived, I was spent of emotions. Instead, I lay motionless on the floor. They were a hazy blur of blue uniforms and soft voices. I could hear them calling my name from far off—like I was under the surface of water. But I couldn’t muster the strength to reply. I heard crying behind me. It must’ve been Will because one of the paramedics said, “Don’t worry, son, we’re gonna take good care of her.” Then I felt myself floating upwards as they put me on a gurney. I rattled and shook as they pulled me out of the house. The flashing lights hurt my eyes. But then a needle pierced my vein, bringing liquid peace to my soul."--Melanie

Jill was born into an inner-city home. Her father began having sex with Jill and her sister during their preschool years. Her mother was institutionalized twice because of what used to be termed “nervous breakdowns.” When Jill was 7 years old, her agitated dad called a family meeting in the living room. In front of the whole clan, he put a handgun to his head, said, “You drove me to this,” and then blew his brains out. The mother’s mental condition continued to deteriorate, and she revolved in and out of mental hospitals for years. When Mom was home, she would beat Jill. Beginning in her early teens, Jill was forced to work outside the home to help make ends meet. As Jill got older, we would have expected to see deep psychiatric scars, severe emotional damage, drugs, maybe even a pregnancy or two. Instead, Jill developed into a charming and quite popular young woman at school. She became a talented singer, an honor student, and president of her high-school class. By every measure, she was emotionally well-adjusted and seemingly unscathed by the awful circumstances of her childhood. Her story, published in a leading psychiatric journal, illustrates the unevenness of the human response to stress. Psychiatrists long have observed that some people are more tolerant of stress than others.

No, hey, no.” He bent down until his eyes were level with hers. “We’re not arguing. I’m just worried about you, OK? I want to keep you safe. I love you, always will. No matter how many times you almost give me a heart attack or a nervous breakdown. It’s just…” He drew off, his voice guttering out. “It’s scary, to know that someone might want to hurt you, or make you scared. You’re my person. My little one. My Sarge. And I’m supposed to protect you.

Okay, this is a fictional character," Lily began. "And he's like a human." "What?" Adam asked her, looking befuddled. "What the fuck does that mean? He's like a human?" He shook his head and scowled at her. "He wears clothes!" she said frantically. I had a feeling that this game had Lily on the verge of a nervous breakdown. "He wears clothes. Great. Well, that narrows it down." The sands of the hourglass were pouring away and Braden, Cam, Jess and I, were laughing our asses off this exchange already. "And he walks upright!" she added waving her hands frantically. "I would hope that most of the people in this game walk upright! Give me a real fucking clue already!" Adam had that homicidal look again. "Duh huh!" she said desperately. "Hey! All you've told me is that he's a fictional character who wears clothes and walks upright. Don't duh huh me!" he spit out angrily. "No! No! he says that!" Suddenly she started making barking noises. "Are you okay?" he asked looking at her like she was nuts. "Has a place in Florida..." She looked seriously stressed out. I was starting to worry. "He's retired?" Adam asked, still looking confused. "He wears bright colored clothes. He tells jokes." "It sounds like you're describing my Uncle Murray," Adam was shaking his head. "Time!" I yelled, almost peeing myself I was laughing so hard. "Goofy! The answer was Goofy!" Lily said with disgust. "Goofy?! That was the best you could come up with for Goofy?!

How many of you are human?” I tap the steering wheel with a nervous rhythm. A red car passes me, slowing down. “You must be a wolf.” I speed up as the car turns around to follow me. “Oh, no you don’t, I’m in the middle of a freaking breakdown. Go away.

During the Society's early years, no member personified the organization's eccentricities or audacious mission more than Sir Francis Galton. A cousin of Charles Darwin's, he had been a child prodigy who, by the age of four, could read and recite Latin. He went on to concoct myriad inventions. They included a ventilating top hat; a machine called a Gumption-Reviver, which periodically wet his head to keep him awake during endless study; underwater goggles; and a rotating-vane steam engine. Suffering from periodic nervous breakdowns––"sprained brain," as he called it––he had a compulsion to measure and count virtually everything. He quantified the sensitivity of animal hearing, using a walking stick that could make an inconspicuous whistle; the efficacy of prayer; the average age of death in each profession (lawyers: 66.51; doctors: 67.04); the exact amount of rope needed to break a criminal's neck while avoiding decapitation; and levels of boredom (at meetings of the Royal Geographical Society he would count the rate of fidgets among each member of the audience).

The failed deal crushed McClure, precipitating a nervous breakdown in April 1900 that propelled him to Europe to undergo the celebrated “rest-cure” devised by an American physician, S. Weir Mitchell. Prescribed for a range of nervous disorders, the rest cure required that patients remain isolated for weeks or even months at a time, forbidden to read or write, rigidly adhering to a milk-only diet. Underlying this regimen was the assumption that “raw milk is a food the body easily turns into good blood,” which would restore positive energy when pumped through the body.

It's like the frog that tried to outdo the cow...see, the consequences are reflected in each of us as individuals. A people so oppressed by the West have no mental leisure, they can't do anything worthwhile. They get an education that's stripped to the bare bone, and they're driven with their noses to the grindstone until they're dizzy -- that's why they all end up with nervous breakdowns. Try talking to them -- they're usually stupid. They haven't thought about a thing beyond themselves, that day, that very instant. They're too exhausted to think about anything else; it's not their fault. Unfortunately, exhaustion of the spirit and deterioration of the body come hand-in-hand. And that's not all. The decline of morality has set in too. Look where you will in this country, you won't find one square inch of brightness. It's all pitch black. So what difference would it make...

While women had proven that they could study on an intellectual level, doctors lamented that the choice made them highly susceptible to “derangements of the nervous system.”6 The problem was that when “minds of limited capacity to comprehend subjects”7 tried to do so, it ultimately led to mental breakdown. That

To drive the point home, here’s one more story. And, as a matter of fact, this person’s story is legendary. He wanted a job, and that job was to become president of the United States. His business failed in 1831. He was defeated in his run for the Illinois State Legislature in 1832. His second business failed in 1833. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1836. He was defeated in his run for Illinois House Speaker in 1838, and for his run for Congress in 1843. He was elected to Congress in 1846, but lost renomination in 1848. He lost his bid to the U.S. Senate in 1854, for vice president in 1856, and again for the U.S. Senate in 1858. Finally, in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States.

Any obstruction of the natural processes of development... or getting stuck on a level unsuited to one's age; takes its revenge, if not immediately, then later on the onset of the second half of life, in the form of serious crises, nervous breakdowns, and all manner of physical and psychic sufferings. Mostly they are accompanied by vague feelings of guilt, by tormenting pangs of conscience, often not understood, in face of which the individual is helpless. He knows he is not guilty of any bad deed, he has not given way to an illicit impulse, and yet he is plagued by uncertainty, discontent, despair, and above all by anxiety - a constant, indefinable anxiety. And in truth he must usually be pronounced "guilty". His guilt does not lie in the fact that he has a neurosis, but in the fact that, knowing he has one, he does nothing to set about curing it.

Our media, which are like a planetary nervous system, are far more sensitive to breakdowns than to breakthroughs. They filter out our creativity and successes, considering them less newsworthy than violence, war, and dissent. When we read newspapers and watch television news, we feel closer to a death in the social body than to an awakening. Yes, something is dying; however, the media do not recognize that something is also being born.

It's a long day, isn't it?' he said. 'Yes,' I replied. There are many such statements in factory conversation, to which the answer is always yes, because they are not so much statements of opinion or fact as they are expressions of a kind of unity. It might be technically correct to reply, 'Today is exactly the same length as yesterday,' or 'You cannot reasonably say that the gauge is wrong,' or 'The manager works very hard,' or 'But it would be impossible to have intercourse in the office in the lunch break' - but it would definitely not be polite. The proper answer in all cases is 'Yes, you are right,' for such is the convention, and no purpose is served by going against it. I remember, years ago, a very young man who suddenly took it into his head to refuse to say 'Good morning' to everyone in the customary way. He said that it was meaningless because everyone knew that it wasn't a good morning at all because they were all at work, and that t was hypocrisy, too, to wish people a good morning when you knew you'd be sneering and carping at them behind their backs before the teabreak had started. Of course he was technically right - but he nearly had a nervous breakdown, and finished up on his knees begging people to say good morning to him. He had to leave, and I never did hear what became of him.

He felt as if he were under an intolerable physical strain, as if his body were likely at any moment to fly to pieces. Other strange physical symptoms came to trouble him. An unpleasant odour lingered in his nostrils, as if he could literally smell the sulphur of the pit; and he had from time to time the curious illusion that his flesh was turning black. He had to look continually at his hands to be sure that it was not so. Nightmares troubled him, waking and sleeping - and one bad dream conjured up another, running from box to box to release its fellows. The world around him seemed to have become equally mad and hateful. The newspapers were full of stories of grotesque violence and unnatural crimes. He knew neither how to go on nor what to do to bring these horrors to an end.

I think the reason lay partly in his idea of immortality, but I think too it belonged to his war against the Inland Revenue. He was a great believer in delaying tactics. “Never answer all their questions,” he would say. “Make them write again. And be ambiguous. You can always decide what you mean later according to circumstances. The bigger the file the bigger the work. Personnel frequently change. A newcomer has to start looking at the file from the beginning. Office space is limited. In the end it’s easier for them to give in.” Sometimes, if the inspector was pressing very hard, he told me that it was time to fling in a reference to a non-existing letter. He would write sharply, “You seem to have paid no attention to my letter of April 6, 1963.” A whole month might pass before the inspector admitted he could find no trace of it. Mr Pottifer would send in a carbon copy of the letter containing a reference which again the inspector would be unable to trace. If he was a newcomer to the district, of course he blamed his predecessor; otherwise, after a few years of Mr Pottifer, he was quite liable to have a nervous breakdown. I think when Mr Pottifer planned to carry on after death (of course there was no notice in the papers and the funeral was very quiet) he had these delaying tactics in mind. He didn’t think of the inconvenience to his clients, only of the inconvenience to the inspector.’ Aunt Augusta

The essence of Roosevelt’s leadership, I soon became convinced, lay in his enterprising use of the “bully pulpit,” a phrase he himself coined to describe the national platform the presidency provides to shape public sentiment and mobilize action. Early in Roosevelt’s tenure, Lyman Abbott, editor of The Outlook, joined a small group of friends in the president’s library to offer advice and criticism on a draft of his upcoming message to Congress. “He had just finished a paragraph of a distinctly ethical character,” Abbott recalled, “when he suddenly stopped, swung round in his swivel chair, and said, ‘I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit.’ ” From this bully pulpit, Roosevelt would focus the charge of a national movement to apply an ethical framework, through government action, to the untrammeled growth of modern America. Roosevelt understood from the outset that this task hinged upon the need to develop powerfully reciprocal relationships with members of the national press. He called them by their first names, invited them to meals, took questions during his midday shave, welcomed their company at day’s end while he signed correspondence, and designated, for the first time, a special room for them in the West Wing. He brought them aboard his private railroad car during his regular swings around the country. At every village station, he reached the hearts of the gathered crowds with homespun language, aphorisms, and direct moral appeals. Accompanying reporters then extended the reach of Roosevelt’s words in national publications. Such extraordinary rapport with the press did not stem from calculation alone. Long before and after he was president, Roosevelt was an author and historian. From an early age, he read as he breathed. He knew and revered writers, and his relationship with journalists was authentically collegial. In a sense, he was one of them. While exploring Roosevelt’s relationship with the press, I was especially drawn to the remarkably rich connections he developed with a team of journalists—including Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—all working at McClure’s magazine, the most influential contemporary progressive publication. The restless enthusiasm and manic energy of their publisher and editor, S. S. McClure, infused the magazine with “a spark of genius,” even as he suffered from periodic nervous breakdowns. “The story is the thing,” Sam McClure responded when asked to account for the methodology behind his publication. He wanted his writers to begin their research without preconceived notions, to carry their readers through their own process of discovery. As they educated themselves about the social and economic inequities rampant in the wake of teeming industrialization, so they educated the entire country. Together, these investigative journalists, who would later appropriate Roosevelt’s derogatory term “muckraker” as “a badge of honor,” produced a series of exposés that uncovered the invisible web of corruption linking politics to business. McClure’s formula—giving his writers the time and resources they needed to produce extended, intensively researched articles—was soon adopted by rival magazines, creating what many considered a golden age of journalism. Collectively, this generation of gifted writers ushered in a new mode of investigative reporting that provided the necessary conditions to make a genuine bully pulpit of the American presidency. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind,” the historian Richard Hofstadter observed, “and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer.