Jennifer Guinyard LMSW says that dealing with a loved one with mental illness can evoke feelings of selfishness.
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Do you know someone who has a mental illness? Well , if you don’t, I can understand why this piece might not make sense to you. It’s hard to be empathetic towards a situation that you have limited understanding about.
As a person who has mental illness myself, this subject hit home. Additionally, family members and peers who also suffer from mental illness surround me. So I’m looking through a slightly different lens. But if I were on the outside looking in (and I’ve met plenty who are), I would understand why engaging with people with mental illness can bring up a variety of feelings.
For example, someone very close to me suffers from depression and substance abuse. For years, I longed to find some effective way to help him and show him that he had my support. I gave him referrals, talked to him about the benefits of talk therapy and medication, and encouraged him to take charge of his life. However, he chose to ignore my advice and go on his own path, which was often plagued with destruction. I had to watch him get inebriated to the point where I no longer recognized him. I watched him sleep for days at a time with no motivation to do or be anything. I perceived him as a walking victim. I became angry and frustrated at my ability to help him work on his issues.
I often had to stop myself, reframe my thinking, and remind myself that this person was sick. As I said, I have mental illness. So I get it. Sometimes when we feel helpless, it evokes feelings of anger and frustration and we perseverate on what the persons illness or behavior is doing to us! We forget how much the individual at hand is suffering and we begin to label them with titles such as “lazy”, “unmotivated”, “professional victims”, and “sad saps.” All of this deriving from our innate feelings of helplessness and insecurities about being ineffective.
But the fact it, that it isn’t about us! It’s about them and we have to remain cognoscente of that. I’ve often heard harsh criticisms of people who commit suicide. People would label them as “selfish” or “weak”. However, we loose sight of how much pain and torment someone would have to be in in order to seriously contemplate and plan a way to take their own life.
Instead of labeling and stigma, we need compassion and support. If you know someone who is suffering from mental illness, instead of ostracizing them and focusing on how their situation impacts you, seek out a support group, a therapist, or family and friends and talk openly about your feelings! It’s not wrong to be impacted by what goes on around you, but it’s wrong to use it as an opportunity to label someone and focus solely on how it impacts you!
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Photo Credit: Christopher Campbell/Unsplash
It is always simple to provide this kind of advice from the outside. Being surrounded by something like half a crowd feeding advice like this one above, the problem is they do not know the whole story. Having not cared of myself that much to prioritize to help the close person(s) in question, has been a problem for me. Yes, it is obvious. But have I ever labeled her with anything, really no. A disease has a name, has to be used to seek and find a cure. Still yesterday when I tried to start the discussion at hand she… Read more »