Sometimes living with someone with a mental illness is like playing a game where no one will tell you the rules and when you do figure out the rules someone changes them. I’ve been married to someone with a mental illness for over 24 years and over that time I have found a number of things that work when he’s struggling but there are times when what has worked before doesn’t or when I miss a subtle warning sign. At the moment I am not living with my husband because he is too unstable and I’m, frankly, burnt out. Even though we’re not living together there are times when I still recognise his patterns. For example, this week he got hold of an idea that distressed him and instead of challenging his thoughts and checking the facts he moped around waiting for someone to force him to talk. Unfortunately for him the friends he’s living with don’t know his patterns and so he kept escalating his behaviour until he went missing and people were concerned for his safety. Actually, in some ways it is good that our friends don’t know the “rules of the game” because he really needs to break this pattern because one day he might not be able to get someone to force his hand and then he could be in real trouble.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure that there’s really a point to this post except that my experience may be similar to someone else’s and I know that there have been many times over the past 24 years when I’ve felt that no one else lives the way we do and it would have made a real difference to know that someone else was going through similar things.<\/p>\n

Please understand that I’m just talking about my experience of living with mental illness and that I know that other people’s experiences are different. For example, living with my mentally ill son was a very different experience. Matey did not have any really obvious patterns and will generally just say that he’s struggling if he is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes living with someone with a mental illness is like playing a game where no one will tell you the rules and when you do figure out the rules someone changes them. I’ve been married to someone with a mental…
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