Supporting Friends With Mental Illness
Living with mental illness can be debilitating and it’s tough to know what to say to someone diagnosed with a mental illness when you’re not sure how to support them. I was recently diagnosed myself with a severe mental illness, and I wanted to share some of the ways that best support me on my journey of healing that should help others understand how to approach it. These are just some suggestions, and feel free to get creative with them and look for more resources online.
Active listening - Instead of offering advice or sharing a story from your life, let the other person just talk so that you can truly listen, hear, and see what this person is going through. This might sound simple, but active listening requires the listener to be present. There will most certainly be awkward silences that make you uncomfortable, but sit with this person through the silence too. There’s no need to have filler conversation - sometimes someone, like me, just needs someone to sit with them while they cry or sit in silence and eventually they will tell their story.
Space - Their trauma is theirs alone and they don’t have to share it if they don’t want to. Maybe they’ll never share their story, but that’s a boundary for them and respecting those boundaries by giving them space to process their trauma is important. Sometimes their trauma(s) are so painful they aren’t able to explain it quite yet. It’s also emotionally draining to keep repeating their story over and over again, and it can be triggering to share those intimate details again. Give them time and space.
3. Affirmations - These are big in mental health, because for me, I’m the harshest critic of myself so I have to practice being self compassionate and kind with the words that I say to myself. I would say things like, “I don’t deserve this, nothing is ever going to get better, I’m trapped, I’m ugly and fat,” and the list goes on and on. These are called “cognitive distortions,” meaning that these are irrational thoughts that are internalized and conditioned in our mind over and over again that we start believing them. Having positive affirmations to remind your friends or family members who struggle with mental illness help create a more positive mindset to fight these cognitive distortions. Some of my favorites are below that I’ve drawn, painted, and wrote on stickie notes to myself to put around the house, but you can make some of your own too, and be creative with it:
There’s no such thing as perfect.
I am enough.
Self care is self preservation.
Failures are opportunities to grow.
Hopefully these suggestions above help yourself or others trying to figure out how to lend support to those they know living with a mental illness. And try these out for yourself too - they might just help you as well.
Live You. Love You
Xo,
Kristin
