Kerry Washington

The patient is not likely to recover who makes the doctor his heir.

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.

It was against my principles and all, but I was feeling so depressed I didn’t even think. That’s the whole trouble. When you’re feeling very depressed, you can’t even think.

The worst drugs are as bad as anybody’s told you. It’s just a dumb trip, which I can’t condemn people if they get into it, because one gets into it for one’s own personal, social, emotional reasons. It’s something to be avoided if one can help it.

In the medical community, you would never deny a diabetic his insulin ever. But for some reasons, when someone needs a serotonin inhibitor, they’re immediately crazy or something. And I don’t know, it’s a very interesting double standard that I often don’t have the ability to talk about but I certainly feel no shame about.

If today I can practice a sport, and move around 90% of the time without a cane, it’s because of the love and support of my producers, record labels and above all my audience who have always believed in me. Otherwise I wouldn’t have made much more progress than I did in the hospital.

Yes. I am mentally ill. I’m not embarrassed about it. And I have written my best work not when flirting with the brink, but when treating my chronic health problem with consistency and care.

I think it’s important for us to have open conversations about mental health, especially with me being black, because we’ve never had therapists in the black community, we’ve never taken medication. I think it was good that when I had my first complete blackout at age 5, my mom didn’t fully medicate me, because I might not have fully been Ye.

Exercise is labor without weariness.

Women in particular need to keep an eye on their physical and mental health, because if we’re scurrying to and from appointments and errands, we don’t have a lot of time to take care of ourselves. We need to do a better job of putting ourselves higher on our own ‘to do’ list.

I have a form of Parkinson’s disease, which I don’t like. My legs don’t move when my brain tells them to. It’s very frustrating.

The healthy stomach is nothing if it is not conservative. Few radicals have good digestions.

I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke.

HIV infection and AIDS is growing – but so too is public apathy. We have already lost too many friends and colleagues.

I feel like there’s this glamour… where the woman who has a psychological illness is in fur, laid out on a chaise. Whereas in reality, a woman with mental illness or… is struggling with her psychological wellbeing is often in sweats and in a T-shirt that used to belong to her dad and is covered in food bits.