I mainly started writing this blog because, although we have started to be better at discussing mental health issues, we seem to be less good at talking about the experience of caring for someone with a mental illness. I think that caring for someone you love who has a mental illness is different from caring for an elderly relative, a disabled child or spouse, or even a terminally ill loved one. I’m not suggesting it’s harder, or easier for that matter, just different. Like all caring it is rewarding, frustrating, exhausting, baffling and, at times, just plain hard work to care for someone who is mentally ill.
Watching my sister-in-law care for her mentally ill husband and continuing to care for my mentally ill husband it seems to me that the most common factor in this journey is confusion. I see the people around us being confused about our husband’s illnesses and what it means and I find myself often confused by behaviour that seems completely rational to my husband. It seems to be hard for people who aren’t living with mental illness on a daily basis have a hard time understanding our life. It also seems that some people think that our husbands’ sometimes odd behaviour somehow has something to do with us or our relationship, they don’t always get that often it’s just the illness.
A few years ago, it was necessary for my husband to work on some of his issues on his own, both because his mental health team wanted him to learn some skills that he had relied on me for and because our son developed severe depression and social anxiety and they really couldn’t cope with living under the same roof. During that time my husband packed up all sorts of things that he decided were clutter. While sorting this out later I found myself often being confused by things that had been packed up together (especially when I found a bag of his own socks in the bottom of a box). Does this change the way I feel about him, no! It just means I have to think way outside the box when loving him, because he totally doesn’t fit into the box.
My hope for this blog is that other people who are dealing with similar situations will find that they are not alone because all caring roles can tend to be quite lonely at times and you often find yourself thinking that you are the only one dealing with these sorts of issues.