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Losing friends due to mental illness

Has anyone else had this happen to them?It really hurts :frown:
Not me actually, but my girlfriend. I think the reason is because mental illness is still very largely misunderstood and, quite honestly, there's still an attachment of stigma. A great majority of people don't grasp that mental illness IS an illness and not a choice. An article (I think it was in The Huffington Post) titled "What If People Treated Physical Illness Like Mental Illness" had an illustration that mocked some of the attitudes towards mental illness:
MI.jpg
(edited 7 years ago)
Original post by davidguettafan
Has anyone else had this happen to them?It really hurts :frown:


Unfortunately, yeah I have. Some people just don't understand mental illnesses enough to know how to deal with it when someone they know or are close to suffer from them.
Yes, I don't blame my friends. I was a ***** because of it.
I isolated myself a lot because I felt it was better that they didn't have to go what I went through. Not because I felt they were going to, because they didn't understand, no matter how many times I explained to them, so in came incredibly pointless advice like it was something I could recover from easily like a cold.
People don't understand a mental illness really until they've experienced it themselves. And it's really ****ing tough because when you are surrounded by people who are ignorant (not always in a bad way) it makes you feel worse about it.
If they were good friends, they would stick by you and support you. If you feel like you are losing them, tell them, and if you need a break, then say, and message every so often to say that's you're doing okay.
I've experienced this!
In my opinion though if they were good enough friends they would learn to understand


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I've lost friends due to mental health problems in a few ways both in terms of death and drifting/pushing each other away. I've lost one through them committing suicide due to severe depression, I've lost contact/drifted away from a few who have shut themselves off from everyone and have changed their numbers, deleted their social media accounts, moved away so it's hard to keep in touch with them and I've also lost friends who no longer bothered with me when my mental health issues became worse or more of a burden to them.


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I'd have to have friends first. :sad:
I have had to cut contact with someone with mental illness. He was very clingy towards me and whenever nothing went his way, blamed everyone else but himself for it. I really couldn't be bothered to deal with his problems. It seemed that his problems were everyone elses fault.

He got sectioned at some point, which was apparently my fault. (I told him to stop contacting me) He then got released from hospital and just would not leave me alone, which made me feel uncomfortable. I raised this with our running coach who told me this was all my fault. My only crime was stupidly agreeing to meet up for coffee with him. (which never happened)

During all this, I was going through some personal problems as well which no-one seemed to care about. All they cared about was the supposed **** I was causing him.

He did once announce that I was going to help him with the issues he was having with the police. I'm not qualified to do and I never agreed to do that. Just why would I do that when he treats me like this?

I have a relative with bi polar who, from what I can tell, is pretty stable. She had a whinge (this was how I found out, btw) that after telling people, she lost them as friends. :frown: Yet, she did nothing wrong at all.

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