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TEXT QUOTES
Because mental illness is a topic that is very personal, an option was included for participants to submit anonymous quotes. These quotes include experiences involving mental illness and how specific factors impacted each person's mental health.
"You have to realize that you have instances of being other-ized or disadvantages in your own life. If you're recreating it for somebody else, what are you doing? You're recreating that cycle of violence."
"Students of color don't want to be perceived as students of color. They want to be perceived as students."
"As an 18 year old in Burlington, I internalized this hatred towards my own race, my own people. You're being asked to subjugate yourself and put on a performance of what society wants you to be."
"I was 17 years old doing donuts in a car. The Arts Department called the cops on me. The cops came in and unleashed a K9 on me."
"Six kids from my high school hockey team robbed a country club. They planned it, bought a bunch of materials to steal beer. Do you know how long they spent in jail? Zero. Do you know how much their participation in sports was affected? Zero. I was told my participation was tenuous because I destroyed property."
"Do they ever show people with mental illness who are of the non-Caucasian persuasion? When I did watch TV, I watched British television, European television and Tunisian television and I don't know if that content reflected more."
"We played sports and people threw pennies at me. We played soccer and people threw batteries at me on the field. That's the thing about cultural change. The problem is the more educated you become, the more aware you are of your condition. Sometimes it is actually better to be ignorant. When I was a kid and didn't know what it was like to be Tunisian or African or Muslim, I didn't know why people didn't like me."
"There was this family. It was 2 older people and 2 younger people waiting for a taxi in Hayanasur, Tunisia. They were dressed sort of nicely. He passes them, stops in front of me and says 'Get in'". I tell him that the family was first. He says to get in quickly before they come and I held the door and flagged them down so they could get in."
"In France in the 70's, my father was refused housing and randomly evicted from housing."
"A lot of times as a doctor, you're looking at a bunch of symptoms. Those symptoms point you to a treatable thing. You have back pain and you diagnose that it's a muscle spasm and you prescribe muscle relaxant. You solve that problem. Someone comes back with neck pain, you prescribe muscle relaxer. You get stressed because you have to pay that. You come in with a headache, doctor prescribes Ambien so now you're taking 4 different drugs but the real origin of that problem can just be stress. Instead of solving that, you solve the symptoms and the problems persist because you never really get to the root cause. That, I think is the root cause for mental illness among people of color."
Text Quotes: Testimonials
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