Mental Illness could almost be the Leprosy of the developed, modern world. In response to those who suffer it, many are reduced to a paralytic silence. Some, induced into insensible platitudes. Others simply turn their backs. A few venture to breach the gap of confusion and decode the puzzle within, and attempt to take the time out to understand. But it is only a few. Unearthing them isn't about pot-luck - it's far more atomised than that. Often the people you imagine will reach out, don't, and on the extremely rare occasion, one is surprised by the solitary individual who does.
This can be problematic for the individual with Mental Illness. This is because once the clarion call is heard that all is not well, a spiral of isolation can quickly ensue. The troubled person reaches out for hands he or she assumes will be there, to discover they have been hastily withdrawn. This compounds the individual's sense of isolation, and increases their perceptions of the stigmas attached to mental illness. From the perspective of the unwell individual, very frequently the most distressing element of all of this, is that those recoiled hands are from those they assumed were allies, friends and often family. Phantom hands. Fair Weather Hands. Accompanied by a deafening silence.
There are other illnesses which still provoke these kinds of responses - HIV still has that throttling ability to torpefy and immobilise other's empathic or active reactions. There a quite a few people I've spoken to with HIV who have recanted that unnecessarily predictable but disheartening observation, "When I was diagnosed with HIV, I learned who my true friends were".
Mental illness, in a completely different orbit of pathology to HIV, is slightly more insidious. This isn't to say there aren't people who don't have a completely misplaced, ill-educated fear of HIV in the Western World, there are many, many who do. But it's an equal, but different type of fear. In the minds of some, they feel mental illness has an almost Gothic, very-ever-so-slightly-sinister Mad Man quality about it - an unknown quantity. Which is sadly a complete inversion of the truth. Those with mental illness are more than seven times as likely to be a victim of abuse, harassment and violence than an individual without mental illness. The overwhelming majority of those who have committed serious violent crime in the UK are perfectly, utterly sane.
It can be difficult to reach out to a person when they are suffering mentally. There is a remarkably simple reason for this. When a person is psychologically troubled, or their thoughts are fractured, their mood is extremely low, or whatever is driving their distress, the entire ebb and flow of communication alters. And dealing with this takes patience and understanding, and sometimes shrugging stuff off.
I lived for almost three years with a man with Unipolar-Bipolar Disorder (basically meaning he never became depressed, but often became psychotic and manic concurrently), and Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). He was an extraordinary person in many ways, but it took Herculean patience (about one of the only virtues I've got) to weather his cycling between normality and mania, hospitals and home. But he was my friend and my lover, and I owed it to him to try and see beyond the illness when he was well, and see him through the illness when he wasn't. In the end it wasn't the illness that spelled the end of our relationship, but something else entirely. I will never regret my time with Lindsay, because to many people he was nothing but a nuisance, and many times I silently felt I could have concurred with that view. But I've learned with hindsight that the nuisance was the illness and the chaos and distress it caused in Lindsay's life, not the person.
And, you know, very often, people with mental illness, have an awful lot to give - time, love, a listening ear, and whether they find lasting wellness or not, can be a worthwhile addition in a person's life. Mental Illness will affect one in three people in their lifetime. That's a three sided die. It's extremely doubtful that a person having gone through mental illness would ever pull their hand away in response to the feel of the fingertips of someone else in distress. It does that to you.
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