Family and mental illness

[DarkLight]

How do you handle being the one in the family with mental illness? It’s been a huge struggle for me. My family understands mental illness, certainly, at least in general. Though they still struggle with the spoon idea, mostly because since I’m not there they often have no idea how many things are going on and what I’m spending spoons on other than the “one little thing” they want me to do.

The biggest trouble is the opposite problem, though. It seems often that anything becomes attributed to mental illness. If I display anger or frustration the first response is that I’m told to check my meds. If I complain about anything someone else in the family does I’m told I should talk to a therapist about why that bothers me. If I take precautions they don’t think are necessary they’ll tell me to stop worrying so much.

Is there any way past this? Is there any way to get them to actually understand?

 

[Xantippe]

How do you handle being the one in the family with mental illness? It’s been a huge struggle for me. My family understands mental illness, certainly, at least in general. Though they still struggle with the spoon idea, mostly because since I’m not there they often have no idea how many things are going on and what I’m spending spoons on other than the “one little thing” they want me to do.

The biggest trouble is the opposite problem, though. It seems often that anything becomes attributed to mental illness. If I display anger or frustration the first response is that I’m told to check my meds. If I complain about anything someone else in the family does I’m told I should talk to a therapist about why that bothers me. If I take precautions they don’t think are necessary they’ll tell me to stop worrying so much.

Is there any way past this? Is there any way to get them to actually understand?

If this is your mom again, don’t bother.

Again, from your stories of your mom, I don’t think you are the only person in your family with mental illness or who is non-neurotypical. Google “[whatever your diagnosis is] genetic” or “[whatever your diagnosis is] hereditary” and sit back and be amazed.

(I’d add that from what I know of the autism spectrum, there are interesting relationships (“comorbidity” is the term they use) between different seemingly unrelated things: autism spectrum, ADHD, Tourette’s and OCD. You often wind up with a constellation of those in the same person–it’s not necessarily one per customer and different mental conditions are not watertight compartments. I’d make a jump from that to speculate that there might still be heredity at play when people of the same family have different but related diagnoses.)

Good luck!

 

[tawny]

Praying for you & your family.

 

[oolaloola]

I was diagnosed with a severe mental illness in 2003, when I was still in college and living with my parents. They worried about me, and rightly so. And any kind of behavior that was wrong, was attributed to a medication issue. Any sort of stress I had needed to be addressed as though it were only related to my mental illness. It was actual very difficult to live at home at this time. I think this was normal because we were all learning what it meant living with someone who was unwell.

Admittedly the only thing that made everything change was when I moved out and lived on my own. It proved to myself that I could make my own choices, and live with my illness on my own. They also learned that they didn’t have to worry as much about that. I still talk with them, and we have a really good relationship, but I don’t really talk about my mental illness with them anymore. I think it’s just better that way for everyone.

My prayers for you.

Sometimes it’s harder to teach others how to accept your illness, than it is to live with it.

 

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I was hospitalized a few times in high school and also found that after that a lot of “normal” negative emotions of struggles became attributed to the mental problem. That was a very long time ago and my experience also has been that once i moved out for college and no longer lived with the family members my mental issues really have not been the subject of much discussion. I do still get a bit of that with my wife however if I am struggling with something enormously stressful she will at times I think discount the stress and just chalk it up to weakness or mental illness on my part. For what it is worth often when my daughter displays a behavior that seems problematic of similar to mine my wife gets very concerned that the behavior resulted from my “bad genes” being passed on to my daughter, so this issue of people attributing too much to a mental illness is an issue that unfortunately may have to be dealt with from time to time. I really don’t have any great practical advice however unfortunately.