Nowadays, lots of people claim to support mentally ill people. They say they want to help us, and the stigmas surrounding mental illnesses to be wiped out. At first, it seems like a good thing :neurotypical people (“mentally healthy”) want to give us support, and let us know that we are not alone. Amazing, you might think.
But that is often until mentally ill people publicly show symptoms of their illness. A mentally ill person has panic attack or a psychotic episode in public, and everyone just backs away, claiming that mentally ill people are “abusive” and “violent”. When people see just how violent and raw mental illnesses really are, they suddenly decide that they aren’t able to help anymore.
The thing is, you don’t get to choose how a mentally ill person behaves nor how visible their symptoms are. Mental illnesses are not a choice, and they influence a person’s daily life and behavior in more ways than you could ever imagine. Rejecting a mentally ill person when they show symptoms is hypocrite and just shows that you are not truly willing to help them – only when it suits you.
If you want to help a mentally ill person (a friend, significant other,…), the best thing you can do is accept their illness – and I mean all of it. You have to accept the anxiety attacks, the manic and psychotic episodes, but also the fact that your loved one has mood swings, is sometimes aggressive, and might not be able to get out of bed for days. This might be very hard for you, but imagine how much more difficult it is for the person that is actually ill. You need to remind yourself that this isn’t anything personal. Your friend is ill, and their behavior is caused by their condition. They do not mean to hurt you or be rude to you – this is the most important thing that people with a mentally ill loved one need to realize. Mentally ill people are not abusive, crazy, or rude : they are ill.
Same goes for neurotypical people who want a say in how mentally ill people cope with their illness. Some people tend to believe that self-diagnosis is a bad thing, while others want mentally ill people to “stop glamorizing their own illness”. It has been a popular opinion lately that mental illnesses are romanticized, by websites like Tumblr and movies and TV shows such as Skins and The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, for example. Now, I do agree that this kind of portrayal can be harmful, and creates wrong ideas about what a mental illness is really like. However, some people use the glorification of their mental illness as a coping mechanism, by turning it into art for example. I personally find that writing poetry about my illnesses is very helpful. In the same way, I’ve seen countless Twitter debates between a neurotypical person and a mentally ill person, in which the neurotypical person told the mentally ill one that they “romanticized their illness” – for example because the person wrote poetry about their illness, or because they made a joke about it.
The thing is, people who suffer from a mental illness all have a different way of coping with their condition, and it is not up to mentally healthy people to decide how they should do that. Mental illnesses affects every aspect of a person’s life, and if you don’t know what it’s like to have one, you have no right to decide how one should cope with their own illness.
Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s a good thing that more people want to support mentally ill people. I personally find it amazing. However, you don’t get to decide which part of the illness you want to support and which one you don’t. Mental illnesses are terrifying, but if we want the stigma and the taboos surrounding them to end, we have to accept them first. And more importantly, non-ill people need to understand that, in order to help us as much as they can, they have to stop raising their voices louder than us. If you want to help us, you don’t get to decide how we show our illness and how it affects us. We are the ill ones : only we can decide how we deal with our illness.
