Please note: this blog post is for people that want to understand mental health more because their loved one/friend is suffering. Nothing mentioned in this post is supposed to be offensive. Thank you.
The saying goes that you cannot fully understand something until you go through it yourself. 1 out of every 4 people suffer with bad mental health which accounts to millions of people worldwide. So, if it is so common, why are there still loads of people that don't understand it as well as you would expect them to? Is it true that people would only understand it if they had no choice but to go through it themselves or can they learn more about it to understand it better? This blog post is about what we want people to understand about us and what doesn’t really help.
The connection between loneliness and bad mental health:
It is true that everyone experiences mental health conditions differently. One person that has severe anxiety may be able to lead a fairly normal life and keep their struggles to themselves. They might not feel alone as they feel comfortable sharing their true thoughts and feelings and they have many people supporting them. Whereas someone else with severe anxiety may not be able to leave the house, they may not be able to talk to people properly and could feel alone if nobody around them understands their symptoms or why they act the way they do. Firstly, it is important for everyone to consider that nobody experiences a mental illness in the same way. Just because one person has a certain set of symptoms, it doesn’t mean that every single person with that condition will feel the same. Although it is good to compare symptoms to understand each other better and to share coping mechanisms etc it is also good to remain open minded and know that everyone’s experience is unique. So, what makes someone with a mental illness feel alone? In my experience, it has always been the fact that nobody knows exactly how I’m feeling.
I try my best to explain my thoughts and feelings to people but if they don’t have the same conditions as me, it is hard for them to imagine. Stigma can also play a big part in loneliness. If a certain mental illness has social stigma (such as seeing someone in a negative light just because of their mental illness) then some sufferers may feel they cannot be open about their symptoms or even admit that they have a certain illness. This can lead to people feeling misunderstood, unseen and extremely lonely. The feeling that nobody truly knows the real you is bound to create a feeling of deep sadness and loneliness. Some people may also feel like a burden to their loved ones and feel that avoiding opening up is best. It is a sad thought but many bad mental health sufferers would rather keep their true thoughts and feelings to themselves to avoid upsetting others and it could be the fear of rejection stopping them too. Sometimes, us feeling alone can be self-inflicted. We may push people away that try to help us, believing that they cannot possibly really care and it's all a fake act. Or we could want to open up badly but our mindset doesn’t allow us to because we have a deep fear of being rejected, being laughed at, being misunderstood even more. Unfortunately, silence becomes our new best friend.
What do we want people to understand about us?
Mental health issues are extremely hard to explain, especially more unknown ones. Depression and anxiety have become the most common mental health issues over the years and the most talked about on social media and in society in general. If you were to tell people you had depression, they would most likely know what sort of symptoms you have and how you feel generally. But the minute someone says they have other conditions such as psychosis, schizophrenia, a personality disorder or even autism, people may shy away from it and change the subject. There is also of course the fact that some people don’t want to understand you or how you feel. It is a very harsh reality to face but some people would simply rather not try to understand how someone else is suffering. People like that can make mental health sufferers feel even more alone and even anxious in their presence. Trying to understand other people’s mental health conditions will also have benefits as it widens knowledge and self-awareness. The fact is helping someone doesn’t ruin your happiness, your mood or your progress as some people think it does, it just helps you to grow as a person, to gain more empathy, to understand someone on a deeper level. It can be emotionally overwhelming at times and definitely a challenge, but it is not something anyone should shy away from.
Examples of how we could feel to help you to understand:
-Scared all the time
Wherever we go, we feel anxious and scared (depending on the condition(s) we have) we feel everyone will judge us for acting differently to others. We think people can tell that we feel anxious and on edge and when someone stares at us, it feels like our whole world is collapsing. We just want to blend into the crowd and get on with our lives without any extra attention. We may sometimes seem ‘okay’ but unfortunately, that is usually an act for other people’s benefit. We often feel like a burden and so, pretending to be okay gives us a break from that for a while.
-Never happy
Happiness is extremely difficult for us. It is an emotion/way of life that not many of us actually experience. If we do think we are having a single happy moment, it is always short lived. We have the odd thought after something good happens and we think ‘finally, some good news’ and a good mood slowly starts to appear on the horizon. But, it is often short lived by intrusive thoughts, feeling anxious for no reason or bad news straight after the good. 85% of people I have spoken to for this blog post have said that they no longer experience positive emotions, whether that is joy, happiness, excitement, or gratitude. Most of us either feel really negative emotions such as fear, sadness, shame etc and when the positive emotions are supposed to come, we feel nothing and go numb. This can seem like an odd concept to people that don’t suffer from a mental health condition as they cannot imagine having good things happen in their lives and not feel any good emotions towards it. It is definitely something that can only be truly understood if you have to go through it. It can also give a sense of us always being ‘miserable’ and not many people want to be around us because of this.
-Loss of hope
Even though some people are nice enough to try and keep us going by saying ‘you’re doing great, keep trying’ or ‘keep pushing, you’ll get there in the end’ etc. it is extremely difficult to believe it. Life is definitely hard for everyone, mental health condition or not and we all have challenges to face in life. But trying to struggle through life like everyone else and also put up with mental health struggles makes everything 100x worse. When we say we have lost all hope, we mean it. It may not mean that we are about to give up and haven’t got the will to keep going and trying, it just usually means we have very little hope that our lives will ever improve or we will achieve our goals. Even if good things happen in our lives, that sense of no hope may still linger. Why? Because people with bad mental health have a certain mindset that sometimes cannot be changed. It is definitely possible for things to improve our mindset, but it’s not always possible for some.
-Completely alone even when surrounded
This may have been briefly mentioned in this post already but feeling alone even when surrounded is one of the worst feelings around. You could be with your most loyal friends and you would still feel alone. To put it visually in a way that some may understand it better, imagine you were locked in a glass box. The glass box goes everywhere with you but nobody else can see it. You try to open up about your feelings and connect with those you love on a deep level, but the glass box prevents you from opening up. You feel completely closed off from the outside world and you only have yourself in the box. Nobody can break the lock and get you out because they have no idea you’re trapped in there and you have no way of telling them that you are. It is a very suffocating feeling that we have to carry around with us all the time. The only time you may feel a slight relief from this is if you are with people that have the same mental health condition as you but even then, you may not feel exactly the same.
nothing is ever good enough
The way the outside world sees us can be completely different to how things are in our reality. What everyone else sees as a great achievement and something to celebrate, we would see as just something we did and because it wasn’t perfect, and we don’t feel proud of ourselves for achieving anything. Some people are shocked to hear that we don’t feel proud when we achieve something ‘great’ and they are even more baffled by the way our minds work. We don’t have all the answers either. We are just going through the motions of each day, trying to survive. Some sufferers don’t even bother to set goals in their lives because they know they will get nothing from it and so they focus on survival only.
So, what do we want people we meet to understand about us?
-We don’t choose to be like this.
Some people assume we ‘choose’ to have mental health conditions for attention or the fact that we ‘refuse’ to help ourselves. This has mainly come from fakers who give us a bad name by pretending to know how we feel to gain attention, but people who really suffer actually hate extra attention and just want to be seen as ‘normal.’ We want our suffering to end but it is never that simple. Yes, there are things that could help, but it is not a guarantee. People often get annoyed with us and think we are deliberately trying to be flippant with them or its our fault that we have certain symptoms. If we are tired and mentally drained, they will say ‘just get more sleep.’ If we struggle with intrusive thoughts, they will say ‘just stop thinking about things too much’ and so on. If you have a serious mental health condition, these symptoms are out of our control. It is like telling someone who has a serious illness like sepsis to ‘tell their body to just fight the infection and get better’. The more people see a mental illness as being just as serious as a physical illness, the more they will understand mental health. Illness is illness.
-We can’t force ourselves to be okay.
Most people who have never suffered from a serious mental health condition may think there is some sort of ‘switch’ that we can turn on or off to get rid of our symptoms. Some even put pressure on us to ‘be in a good mood’ during family events or days out because we affect their moods too much. We are known to ‘bring the mood of the room down.’ We are aware that people want us to be okay, but that puts more pressure on us. If we could, we would! Some are even under the delusion that if we are in nature and gorgeous surroundings or spending time with our favourite people, that it will cure everything on our minds because why wouldn’t we be in a good mood? The fact is, we don’t know. Some things we have to cope with are far too dark and complicated to be solved by simple things such as going out for a walk or chatting to a friend etc. Yes, these things may help to take a breather from our daily sufferings but with what we go through, there is no ‘quick fix’ and it takes more than a decent day out to solve any problems we may have. It is important to remember that we don’t think like other people. Our minds work differently and our symptoms continue whether we are out with friends trying our best to have a good time or indoors thinking about things. We cannot escape our minds and therefore, we cannot escape our symptoms.
-Trying to relate to us doesn’t help.
Okay, yes. If you have a friend with the same mental health condition as you and you share some of the same symptoms, telling each other about your experiences and comparing may help. You could both give each other solutions on what works best for you and even learn from the other person. But something that really doesn’t help anyone is when someone without your condition says ‘I know how you feel’ because in truth, they don’t. How could they? Unless they have lived through the exact same experience, they have no idea how we could possibly feel. They may say it out of kindness, and that is appreciated as they want to understand us on a deeper level and they are trying to connect with us but it just doesn’t work. It doesn't have the desired effect that some are hoping for. In fact, it does quite the opposite. If you were laid in a hospital bed and you had just had a near death experience and someone came to your bedside and said ‘don’t worry, I know how you feel’ and they had never even had a slight injury, never mind what you had been through, you would wonder why they made that comparison and it would make you feel even worse. Not only that, it’s important not to compare your own experiences to other people as though life is a competition on who can have the worst life just to gain sympathy. Be there for each other but never ever compare for attention and sympathy and that is what trying to relate to someone, knowing you’ve never been through the same thing, can look like.
-We want people to ask us questions.
This may be based on personal preference but 88% of people that I have asked during my research for this blog post is that people that suffer with a serious mental health condition actually want family and friends to ask questions. We want people to want to understand us more and therefore, we don’t mind explaining a diagnosis in more detail or going over our symptoms to make things clear to people. We don’t expect those close to us to know everything just by mentioning the name of a mental health condition. We appreciate it when people do their own research but most of us also don’t mind answering questions because it shows interest in wanting to understand us and make us feel comfortable and respect our boundaries. If asking questions means someone close to us becomes more educated on our mental health condition, we are happy to talk about it and explain things.
-Everyone is different - never judge someone
Yes, it is easier said than done and for most people, judging is an automatic thing we do. But too many people judge harshly. If someone has depression but acts even slightly differently to other people with depression, they are judged and people may even accuse them of lying about their condition. It is extremely important not to single anyone out - mental health condition or not. We should all celebrate being different and not shame each other for it. When someone already feels nowhere near ‘normal’ and people point it out, it makes them feel worse. Everyone wants to feel as though they belong somewhere, so we should refrain from judging others as much as possible.
-You don’t need to fear us - we are still human
It seems that there is this big thing about avoiding things you don’t understand due to fear. Some people are intimidated by things that they don’t understand and so they try to avoid it. Mental health conditions with severe symptoms such as psychosis, for example, creates fear in people that don’t have it. This could be due to people not being able to imagine how it feels or the fear of being around someone who has it because their behaviour may be unpredictable. Just like anything in life, anything that seems frightening needs to be tackled head on as hiding from it will do no good. This can be done by talking to the person with the condition and getting a clearer picture on how it feels from their perspective. Also, try to think of how scary it must be for the person with the condition as well.
What to take from this post:
No matter how hard we try, some people may not be able to understand how we feel and that's okay. As decent humans, we should aim to be empathetic with one another and care enough to at least try to understand. From a sufferers perspective, we find it hard to understand how the mind of someone without a condition works. Some of us have had mental health conditions for that long that we simply cannot remember a time where we felt ‘normal’ and so not having a mental health condition casting a shadow over us would feel strange and out of the ordinary. Therefore, we all need to learn from each other because every single one of us can offer a fresh perspective to someone else. I hope this post helped someone out there to understand a bit more about how mental health sufferers feel. Please stay tuned for mental health posts coming soon.
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