Diana

“Medical students are taught to imagine a binary: doctor and patient, science and faith, objective truth and superstitious fallacy, us and them. Our morning rounds are an exercise in telling and retelling patients’ stories in a way that explains their illnesses, cloaked in the sense of objectivity offered by a white coat. But the stories told on these rounds are just as prone to false truths as the reports of an amnesia patient, subconsciously shaped by our priors, our communities, our own narratives. On rounds, a woman’s pain might be recast as anxiety, for instance, while a vitamin deficiency born of alcohol use might be regarded as a deserved punishment.”
― Pria Anand, The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains

“It’s always wide open for a child. A child cannot open or close the door of consent. The handle is simply not within reach.”
― Neige Sinno, Sad Tiger

“I’ve suffered from anxiety and depression since I was twelve years old. The pain is a fanged beast that I’ve battled a hundred times throughout the years, and every time I think I’ve cut it down for good, it reanimates and launches itself at my throat again.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

“Framing illness as even involving morality seems to me a mistake, because of course cancer does not give a shit whether you are a good person. Biology has no moral compass. It does not punish the evil and reward the good. It doesn’t even know about evil and good.

Stigma is a way of saying, “You deserved to have this happen,” but implied within the stigma is also, “And I don’t deserve it, so I don’t need to worry about it happening to me.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection