Losing Our Minds Quotes

“Stressful life events also contribute to mental illness because they can affect the way we view ourselves, the world, and other people.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“Changing ideas change people... and changed people necessitate changes in ideas.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“It serves to remind us that the official list of psychiatric diagnoses is essentially a list of ideas, not a catalog of biological truth.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“If we take the view that a person's response to an event, rather than the event itself, should determine what "counts" as a trauma, then potentially anything could.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“the culture and time in which someone lives are relevant in determining whether a belief is pathological. Paranormal or unscientific beliefs are only considered delusions if they aren't widely sanctioned by the person's culture or society.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“As we develop our understanding of what mental illness actually is, we must also recognize what it isn't. Sadness and stress and worry are part of the human condition. The medicalization of what should be considered normal and the categorizing of all suffering as a disorder helps no one.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“Since we've started talking publicly about mental health, the language people are using to describe common, transient negative feelings has become caught up in the language we should be reserving for mental illness. Maintaining a distinction between the two-which is essential if we are to effectively help those on both sides - is vital.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“The first step in this chain reaction is that the goalposts that define what counts as mental illness are being picked up and moved. In the rush to destigmatize mental illness, and the confusion about what it really is, all kinds of normal negative emotions and experiences are being labeled as mental disorders- or at the very least, as problems that need to be fixed.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“Grief is the price we pay for love, the saying goes; I would add that all forms of psychological distress are the price we pay for being alive. Suffering is part of being human.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“There isn’t a clear boundary between the everyday and the pathological.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“CBT is not for everyone. Some find it exceptionally helpful, but the truth is that changing the way you think is really, really hard. It can feel like the equivalent of trying to change your political or moral beliefs, or changing who you love.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“For some people, mental illness is not something they “recover” from, it is a long-term challenge and disability.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“Just because something’s a spectrum, and there will be gray areas, doesn’t mean we should use the same language for everything. We need to preserve some words—and a clear understanding of what they mean—for the people who are seriously psychologically unwell, even if the edges around that group are blurred. If we don’t, everyone ends up suffering more.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“Another possible explanation for the increase in mental health problems and disorders today is that we’re exposed to the same level of stress—or maybe less stress—than people were previously, but we are reacting to it in a particularly bad way.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“In summary, social media doesn’t play a single role in any mental illness or mental health problem. It depends who you are, what you’re looking for, and what you find.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“But there’s also a lot of positive content about mental illness on the internet, too. A great deal of online activity relating to self-harm, for example, is actually about access to social support.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“One possibility is that online material makes absolutely no difference to a person’s state of mind, that what matters is what’s happening in real life.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“What we actually do on social media varies a lot: from person to person, and even within the same person, depending on the day. If we want to understand how social media affects mental health, then surely we need to look in a bit more detail at how people are spending their time on the apps, rather than simply measuring the number of hours they are on them.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“This attitude is widespread. Intuitively, it feels right: in a relatively short space of time, we have transformed the way we communicate. Many of us spend hours on a device that’s specifically designed to lock in our attention.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“According to many headlines and informal conversations, social media is having a devastating effect on people’s mental health, particularly young people.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“But the truth is that there is no simple explanation for anyone’s disorder or distress. We are all a bundle of hundreds of layers of explanation—some biological and some environmental—and those layers all interact with each other.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“If you are depressed and anxious, you are not a machine with malfunctioning parts. You are a human being with unmet needs. The only real way out of our epidemic of despair is for all of us, together, to begin to meet those human needs—for deep connection, to the things that really matter in life.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“attempts to alter, avoid, or control emotional responding.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“I could go on, but the bottom line is this: stressful life events affect the way you process reward, your sense of hope for the future, your ability to regulate your emotions, your memory, your capacity to process new information … essentially all the processes that, as we’ve seen so far, can put you at risk for developing mental illness. But we are still missing something important. Experiencing stress, trauma, and disadvantage—even a hell of a lot of it—doesn’t guarantee that anyone will develop a mental illness. Something else is needed, too.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“Interestingly, a problem can also arise if regions in the SN aren’t paying enough attention: like the disruption in this network found in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Hypoactivity in these regions can mean that individuals with ASD don’t pay enough attention to social information like facial expressions—which most people experience as highly salient—which then leads to a cascade of difficulties with social behavior and relationships.16”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness