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Link – When Your Friends Don’t Understand Your Mental Illness

ByMikeM Reading Time: 1 minute

This is hard to accept, but it’s something that I suspect many of us have had to learn.

Certain people do not know how to react to mental illness. They judge, they fear, they believe stigmas and would like to put everything in a box to make sense of the world around them. They don’t have the ability to support, love and accept someone battling mental illness. And no matter how many times I went back, asked differently, proved I’m not the “dragon” they think I am, I was the one who was hurt and disappointed.

We want our friends, the people who’ve known us forever, and our family to be the support we need when dealing with mental health problems, but sometimes they just can’t do it. That’s OK. It’s a shortcoming of theirs that has nothing to do with us. People are free to choose how they want to deal, or not deal, with a friend’s diagnosis. That’s life. Our healing shouldn’t be dependent on that, instead we should look elsewhere for that support. Which is also OK.

I Had to Stop Looking for Support From Friends Who Couldn’t Understand My Mental Illness

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