80 Mental Health Awareness Month Quotes For Work in 2024

This is a list of inspirational Mental Health Awareness Month quotes for work.

Mental Health Awareness month quotes are sayings that speak to the experience with living with mental illness and the importance of tending to psychological wellbeing. For example, “Self-care is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation.” These sayings aim to educate listeners about mental health and empower individuals with psychological conditions to be their best selves.

These phrases are one way to observe Mental Health Awareness Month in the office and are an example of employee wellness initiatives.

This list includes:

• inspirational mental health quotes
• mental health quotes by psychologists
• short mental health quotes
• mental health quotes from literature
• famous mental health quotes
• mental health quotes for employees

Let’s get to it.

Inspirational mental health quotes

1. “Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith.” – Henry Ward Beecher
2. “Dealing with depression effectively is a mark not of weakness, but of strength.” – Andrew Solomon
3. “We have been given a challenging illness, and there is no other option than to meet those challenges. Think of it as an opportunity to be heroic—not ‘I survived living in Mosul during an attack’ heroic, but an emotional survival. An opportunity to be a good example to others who might share our disorder.” – Carrie Fisher
4. “My dark days made me stronger. Or maybe I already was strong, and they made me prove it.” – Emery Lord
5. “Nobody can save you but yourself, and you’re worth saving. It’s a war not easily won, but if anything is worth winning then this is it.” – Charles Bukowski
6. “We expect well-informed treatment for cancer or heart disease; it matters no less for depression.” – Kay Redfield Jamison
7. “I’m interested in sensitivity and weakness and fear and anxiety because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that’s what we are.” – Alain de Botton
8. “We must bring the issue of mental illness out into the sunlight, out of the shadow, out of the closet, deal with it, treat people, have centers where people can get the necessary help.” – John Lewis
9.  “Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.” – Carl Jung
10. “What mental health needs is more sunlight, more candor, and more unashamed conversation.” – Glenn Close

Mental health quotes by psychologists

1. “One of things so bad about depression and bipolar disorder is that if you don’t have prior awareness, you don’t have any idea what hit you.” – Kay Redfield Jamison
2. “Mental health is a continuum, and people may fall anywhere on the spectrum.” – Amy Morin
3. “About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times.” – Carl Jung
4. “The role of anxiety in the development of human personality is central, and it is intricate beyond our understanding.” – Timothy Leary
5. “Moods are complicated and very much a part of who we are. People would be very boring without them.” – Kay Redfield Jamison
6. “The only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well.” – Alfred Adler
7. “The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.” – Carl Rogers
8. “Trauma is a fact of life. It does not, however, have to be a life sentence.” – Peter A. Levine
9. “Hope never abandons you, you abandon it.” – George Weinberg
10. “If you want to truly understand something, try to change it.” – Kurt Lewin
11. “Conflict is the beginning of consciousness.” – M. Esther Harding
12. “Let us choose to believe something good can happen.” – J. Martin Kohe
13. “Problems are not the problem; coping is the problem.” – Virginia Satir
14. “In the end, the only people who fail are those who do not try.” – David Viscott

Short mental health quotes

1. “Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.” – Plato
2. “Depression is the inability to construct a future.” – Rollo May
3. “Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human.” – Janet Fitch
4. “Therapy is not a ‘white thing.’ It’s a clinical thing.” – Rosie Perez
5. “Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.” – Henry David Thoreau
6. “One small crack does not mean that you are broken, it means that you were put to the test and you didn’t fall apart.” – Linda Poindexter
7. “Your illness is not your identity. Your chemistry is not your character.” – Rick Warren
8. “There is no such thing as pure pleasure; some anxiety always goes with it.” – Ovid
9. “If you are broken, you do not have to stay broken.” – Selena Gomez
10. “Healing takes time, and asking for help is a courageous step.” – Mariska Hargitay
11. “The bravest thing I ever did was continuing my life when I wanted to die.” – Juliette Lewis
12. “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.” – Helen Keller
13. “Self-care is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation.” – Audre Lorde
14. “We all have an edge. We all are floating our psyche on top with a great ocean underneath.” – Brad Dourif
15. “You are not broken. You are breaking through.” -Alex Myles
16. “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

Mental health quotes from literature

1. “Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.” – Anais Nin
2. “Now is the age of anxiety.” – W. H. Auden
3. “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” – Ernest Hemingway.
4. “Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.” – Victor Hugo.
5. “I have been bent and broken, but — I hope — into a better shape.” – Charles Dickens
6. “Depression is melancholy minus its charms – the animation, the fits.” – Susan Sontag
7. “There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn’t.”- John Green
8. “There is no standard normal. Normal is subjective. There are seven billion versions of normal on this planet.” – Matt Haig
9. “We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.” – D.H. Lawrence
10. “Make not your thoughts your prisons.” – William Shakespeare
11. “It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative–whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.” – Sylvia Plath
12. “Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you’ve felt that way.” – Charles Bukowski
13. “I have the normal complement of anxieties, neuroses, psychoses and whatever else – but I’m absolutely nothing special.” – Clive Barker
14. “I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship.” – Louisa May Alcott.
15. “Meanwhile in my head, I’m undergoing open-heart surgery.” – Anne Sexton
16. “We must travel in the direction of our fear.” – John Berryman
17. “A man does not recover from such jolts– he becomes a different person and, eventually, the new person finds new things to care about.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Famous mental health quotes

1. “Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary.” – Fred Rogers
2. “You don’t have to control your thoughts. You just have to stop letting them control you.” – Dan Millman
3. “Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.” – J.K. Rowling
4. “The advice I’d give to somebody that’s silently struggling is: You don’t have to live that way. You don’t have to struggle in silence. You can be un-silent. You can live well with a mental health condition, as long as you open up to somebody about it, because it’s really important you share your experience with people so that you can get the help that you need.” – Demi Lovato
5. “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” – Leonard Cohen
6. “Mental health problems don’t define who you are. They are something you experience. You walk in the rain and you feel the rain, but you are not the rain.” – Matt Haig
7. “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” – Winston Churchill
8. “It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.” – Aristotle
9. “Mental health needs a great deal of attention. It’s the final taboo and it needs to be faced and dealt with.” –  Adam Ant
10. “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.” – Michelle Obama

Mental health quotes for employees

1. “Mental health is just as important as… physical health and deserves the same quality of support.” – Kate Middleton
2. “If we start being honest about our pain, our anger, and our shortcomings instead of pretending they don’t exist, then maybe we’ll leave the world a better place than we found it.” – Russell Wilson
3. “Give yourself a break. Stop beating yourself up!. Everyone makes mistakes, has setbacks and failures. You don’t come with a book on how to get it right all the time.” – Les Brown
4. “Nothing diminishes anxiety faster than action.” – Walter Anderson
5. “It does not mean you’re broken to have depression and anxiety. I would encourage you to speak out. Don’t hold it inside. Talk to friends. Talk to parents. If it’s available, go to a therapist.” – Dan Reynolds
6. “Mental illness can happen to anybody. You can be a dustman, a politician, a Tesco worker… anyone. It could be your dad, your brother or your aunt.” – Frank Bruno
7. “I found that with depression, one of the most important things you could realize is that you’re not alone.” – Dwayne Johnson
8. “The authority of depression is horrifying. I felt like my brain was busted and that I could never feel good again. I really thought that I was never gonna heal.” – Dick Cavett
9. “At some stages of your life you will deal with things and at others you are overwhelmed with misery and anxiety.” – Nigella Lawson
10. “You need community support. You’re pretty defeated when you’re laid low with a mental illness. It’s a frightening place to be, and to get up and be able to stand and to move forward and to start functioning again, you need so much support. You need to feel you’re not alone.” – Margaret Trudeau
11. “The vast majority of people who have mental illness problems never hurt anybody.” – Penn Jillette
12. “A lot of people are living with mental illness around them. Either you love one or you are one.” – Mark Ruffalo
13. “The experience I have had is that once you start talking about [experiencing a mental health struggle], you realize that actually you’re part of quite a big club.” — Prince Harry

Conclusion

Mental health is often misunderstood, and despite strides in awareness within the past few years, some stigma remains. Sharing quotes is an easy way to promote mental wellbeing in the workplace during Mental Health Awareness Month and throughout the year, and a means of sending encouragement and support to employees struggling with mental illness without explicitly calling them out. These sayings can help to spark meaningful conversations about mental health and can champion resilience.

For more mental health tips for work, check out these guides to work-life balance and positive work environments.