If you ask the internet how to love someone with mental illness, you will find a variety of advice articles, and I do not aim for this to be one. The topics that people discuss online include how to treat these people, how you should change your behavior in order to fit their needs, and how to cope with the added stress that loving someone with mental illness brings to your life. I don’t want to know how to love someone according to what a third party source, someone who doesn’t suffer from mental illness, or has not suffered at any point in their life from mental illness, thinks I should be doing. Mental illnesses are not uncommon, and nor are the fact that these people are loved and cared for too, and these are the voices that I would want to hear from, which is often times not the case.
Not everyone wants to speak on their experiences, and I cannot say that I know and understand every reason, but I believe that speaking on your experiences has its benefits. By speaking about your experience with having mental illness or with having loved ones with mental illness, the potential now exists for you and for others to feel more normal about their lives. No one is alone in their experiences, even though the stigmas about mental illness would make people believe otherwise. Mental illnesses come in so many variants and affect a large portion of the United States and the world as a whole. It's important to note that no mental illness is worth more or less valid than the other.
To me, loving someone with mental illness is no different than loving anyone else. There is no guide to loving anyone, because there simply can’t be. Because the fact is, every form of mental illness is different. In my life I’ve had several examples in the people I love, including complex Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder. If you spend time with someone you can see how their mental illness displays – what parts of their behavior are because of their medication, or is a side effect of their condition. By identifying those behaviors and learning what works in situations to support them best by calming the situation or preventing it from escalating, you display a form of love. Your care for someone and the detail that you pay to their daily life helps to make them not need to explain themselves to you as much. I think we all know what that feeling is like when someone else remembers things about us, or remember what they can do to help us. It is important where mental illness is involved too.
I think often times people feel like they need to be some sort of universal caregiver if they let someone with mental illness play a role in their life. The important thing is to realize that mental illness is not incapacity to function in everyday life, nor relationships. It is never your place to coddle someone, nor try and treat them. You should encourage them to seek treatment and maintain treatments that are actively benefiting their condition, but you should know that not every person responds the same way ever day. There are always good days and bad days with mental illness, just like anyone else.
Additional resources can be found at https://www.nami.org/ and http://www.activeminds.org/. I am not representative of either of these organizations or affiliated with them, but they are certainly valuable resources.
