Quotes about Stigma

There were so few Asians on-screen when I grew up, and the ones who were on-screen weren't given complex characters to play.

Give a dog a bad name and you may as well hang him." But give him a good name—and see what happens!

Why is it, comedian Lily Tomlin asks, "that when we speak to God we are said to be praying but when God speaks to us we are said to be schizophrenic?" Such a response from ourselves or others to someone's claim to have heard from God is especially likely today because of the lack of specific teaching and pastoral guidance on such matters.

It comforts everybody to think of all Negroes as dirt poor, and to regard those who were not, who earned good money and kept it, as some kind of shameful miracle. White people liked that idea because Negroes with money and sense made them nervous. Colored people liked it because, in those days, they trusted poverty, believed it was a virtue and a sure sign of honesty. Too much money had a whiff of evil and somebody else's blood.

What are you? Some kinda mermaid?" one man had shouted, and reached hurriedly for his socks.

You cannot understand how intense depression and anxiety can be unless you have been there, and not every chemical imbalance signifies a demon. Sometimes we need to give people permission to take medication if they need it—which, by the way, is a huge no-no in many Christian circles.

AIDS is the leprosy of the 21st Century. Where did Jesus hang out? With lepers. Jesus would love on people with AIDS.

Inquest juries frequently linked suicide to cheap literature. When a twelve-year-old servant boy hanged himself in Brighton in 1892, the jury delivered a verdict of 'suicide during temporary insanity, induced by reading trashy novels'. When a twenty-one-year-old farm labourer in Warwickshire shot himself in the head in 1894, the coroner suggested that the fifty penny dreadfuls found in his room had had 'an unhinging and mesmeric effect' upon his mind.

Dom Helder Camara, a twentieth-century bishop in Brazil, said, "When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a Communist.

When I fed the hungry, they called me a saint. When I asked why people are hungry, they called me a communist." Charity

And the danger is - and it's happening - is we're seeing an incredibly big rise amongst young gay people, young heterosexual people as far as catching HIV, which is, you know, in an educated country like this or in Britain, it's frightening.

Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, but stigma and bias shame us all.