The Harsh Reality of Losing Friends When You Live With a Serious Mental Illness

Although I side-track a little, I write today about friendships and how to make them and maintain them, along with some suggestions from my 35 years of lived experience.

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I want to start this blog post with a positive story. Just on a side note, when someone says, I have good news and bad news, which do you want first, I always opt for bad news first. When you get the bad news first, you not only get the negative out of the way straight off the bat, but also you will leave your news session feeling better because the last thing you heard was good news.

On another side note to this, your favourite blogger (me I hope) is an eternal optimist. I always try and look at the positive side of things, I always like to frame things in a way that focuses on the good things. I often say if someone were to tell me I was going to die on Sunday, I would let out a happy cheer over the fact that this week, I won’t have to do laundry on Saturday.

But on into the post. When I think of friendships, I have a number of them that I find incredibly rewarding and worth investing time and money in. One of course is my brother, who has a lot going for him, but feels so marginalized and isolated that he hasn’t had the best time in his life for the past few years. I really love my brother, and I have always looked up to him. In school, mostly in junior high and high school, he was a boxer and a bodybuilder and I think I escaped a number of beatings just by the fact that he could pretty much kick the ass of anyone who treated me poorly.

But there is one friendship, a fairly new one when you consider that I have friends now (I am 53) that I have known since as far back as age 3 and other friends who I was in the first grade with. One of them, a wonderful person named Kerri has been incredibly kind to me but I just heard from her that she had a very serious health scare and in addition to other things, she is now on a pacemaker. I kind of hope anyone out there who prays could say a special prayer for Kerri. I know that prayer has a lot of power and it would really mean a lot to me if anyone could.

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Sorry, I did get sidetracked there. I wanted to talk about one of my newest friendships, but one of my most rewarding. I went through a phase last year when I was reading every book I could get my hands on that dealt with mental illness. One of these books was called “The Ghost Garden.” I can’t say enough about this book. It is the story of a woman who volunteers her time visiting psychiatric patients in a place called “The Douglas Hospital” in Montreal, Quebec. This was an incredibly moving, and even at times somewhat horrifying book. What I most couldn’t get over was how the person who visited the patients, (the author) she was able to always look on the bright side of the person, and to show such incredible compassion for them. There was one story where a person did something absolutely horrible, acting on delusional thoughts that badly physically hurt someone, but still the author, Susan Doherty, spoke of how much in the grips of their illness this person was in.

I was so moved by this book. What was absolutely incredible was that I looked up and found an email for the author. I wrote to her and she actually wrote back. Over a short period of time, we got to be friends. One of the first acts of kindness she showed me was to send me her latest book called “Monday Rent Boy” which is a fictional story of two young boys who are victims of sexual assault and how that trauma affected their whole lives. I can’t say enough about Susan. I don’t know why, but one of the other things she did was not only to send me my very own hardcover copy of “The Ghost Garden” but she also sent me two shipments of 20 copies of “The Ghost Garden” in paperback to distribute as I saw fit. As a quick plug, anyone who contacts me here about my three mental health memoirs and buys all three, I throw in a free copy of “The Ghost Garden”. My three books are “Through the Withering Storm” telling the story of my teen years as my illness progressed, “Inching Back to Sane” which begins with me accepting my illness and then goes through my long, non-linear recovery period, and then there is the third book, which tells in a completely unique way, the story of me being hospitalized after 20 years of good mental health, for five weeks for psychosis. This final book includes such things as statements from my family, my clinical records from the hospital, and handwritten poems from my hospital stay.

Anyone wishing to buy one or all three books, please feel free to contact me directly (you can also write to say hi or to ask any questions) at:

leif.n.gregersen@gmail.com

But aside from giving a plug for my books, I wanted people to understand Susan’s work and how she has treated me so incredibly well. In response to her kind gifts, I sent her a copy of all of my own books, everything but my latest short story collection which is called “Voted Off the Crew” There just wasn’t room in the mailing box. I really do see myself travelling to see Susan in Montreal, and it would be so amazing to visit the Douglas Hospital with her at some point.

So there is the good news. Sometimes the insight mental illness gives those who suffer an amazing experience of making a solid, good friend who will stay by your side.

I think it is important to start off any article I write about losing friends by saying not all of my ended relationships and friendships were due to people not being able to accept my illness. Some of them were clearly through faults of my own. One of the things that is most devastating in my mental health journey is that living with schizoaffective disorder and anxiety left me pretty much housebound for a number of years. During this time, I had one friend who I was very close to going all the way back to Air Cadets and my first year of high school. One time he invited me on a camping trip and I got obnoxiously drunk, caused a scene at the campground and he didn’t talk to me for a while. It seems that he still tried to be my friend and after he got over that one trip, he seemed to try very hard to help me get my life on track. There was even a time when he would drive from deep in the suburbs to my inner city apartment, take me for lunch and then a movie and never asked for a cent. Then something happened that I still almost can’t believe. I got a large cheque from the disability pension I was on and he came to me for a large loan. After all the things he had done for me, I didn’t hesitate to give it to him, but then he literally disappeared from my life for 10 years. He did finally pay me back slowly over time, but didn’t include any of the promised interest, and he seemed really put out that someone would ask him to repay a loan. Soon after, what I thought would be a friendship for life ended.

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I could go on about different people and the unfairness of stigmatizing a person and ending friendships, but in reality that wouldn’t be anything constructive, it would just be me letting loose my own personal rant. The truth is, in my life there were periods when I was yet to start treatment, and other times when I had been in treatment and wasn’t complying.

Of all the friendships in my life, perhaps the most important one was a young woman I will call Cathy. I met her in adult high school and we got along incredibly well. She is married now, but I have the great fortune of being trusted enough by her husband to keep up our friendship in which we talk for as much as two hours a day on the phone, and I also take them for groceries once a month (they live in a small town). I have so much good feeling and respect for Cathy. But there was a time we just couldn’t be friends, and much of that was my fault. It was 20 years ago and I had lowered (not stopped—which is hopefully a warning to anyone who wants to tinker with their medications) one of my medications and became very psychotic (again I want to emphasize the difference between psychotic and psychopath. Psychotic is when you are in psychosis and have a hard time distinguishing between reality and your own delusional thinking, given more weight often by hallucinations and paranoia).

During this time, I contacted Cathy’s sister and upset her a great deal. She cut off contact with me, and over the next six months while I was sorting out my meds in the hospital, we had no contact and it was one of the hardest times of my life. I will never forget how hard it was to get into her apartment building and how upset she was when we spoke. But she is incredibly kind and forgiving and our friendship began all over again.

I don’t know any easy answers to losing friends when you have a mental illness. All I can really say is that you need to find the medications that help you, and if they are not helping you, either find a psychiatrist who can work with you to minimize your side effects and maximize your respite from the harder parts of your illness. Once you have done this, it is so important to follow instructions to the letter. Of course, you need to give your medical/psychiatric team good, solid, truthful feedback about what you are going through in order for them to best help you.

Above all, it can be so important to take advantage of counselling, group counselling, any supports in the community you need, and to be open to changing how you feel about some things. I took a life skills class once, and it taught me a great deal about communicating and meeting people and generally functioning with a mental illness. There are more support groups of which I took part in that also helped. Some of these were 12-step groups for habits and addictions. I took part in them, but I feel it is important not to let these groups run your life. For a whole year, I went to a 12-step group nearly every day and read all I could about addictions which helped me quit the habit for 10+ years now. But you have to be very cautious about making friends with people in these situations. Go to help yourself out of a tight spot, but not to make friends. One time I met an absolutely gorgeous young woman and we got to be quite close. I won’t get into all the details other than to say I liked her in many ways despite her active addictions, but the time I knew it had to end was when she told me that I didn’t have anything wrong with me, I was just lazy. This was at a time when I was working an incredibly physically challenging job as a stage hand.

Some of the other great group counselling groups a person can attend will be different in different states or provinces. I think in the US, one of the good places to seek help is through NAMI. Of course, for anyone living with schizophrenia or who has family members who live with the illness, there is a great organization called CURESZ, based in Ohio. Among many other services, they have a caregiver mentoring program where they will match a new caregiver with an experienced one to help guide them through the process.

So, my opinion after stating all this is, if you are taking medications as prescribed, if you have developed a good deal of emotional stability through therapy, counselling and support groups, there should be no reason why you can’t have real, solid friendships. When you are ill, it is important to have a few friends who have experienced a mental illness like yours but not to rely on them too heavily or ask too much from them. Treat your friendships like gold coins, you don’t want to spend all of them in a time of need, but that is why you keep them—for emergencies. I like to often say good things about the WRAP program, or Wellness Recovery Action Plan. You take the course while you are stable and feeling okay, and you write out a plan for when you aren’t doing so well and it gives you back the power in regards to your illness. There is even an APP for most phones where you can enter things like what triggers you, what doctor you want to treat you if you are ill, and much more.

Basically, what any person with a serious mental illness should do aside from optimizing their current situation, is to put a lot of time and effort into making real, understanding, solid friends and hopefully co-workers or classmates. Be kind to your friends, for so many people they are your most important people. One thing I am so grateful for was that when I was last hospitalized, I not only had a good deal of visitors, I knew one person in the hospital from work we had done together. I had a horrible time there, I was very ill and paranoid, but it meant so much to me that people like my landlord came to visit and assured me I still had a place to live, not to mention my boss came to visit and assured me my job was safe. Even Cathy called from her remote location and lied about being my sister so we could talk.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

I wish I had some good advice to give on how a mentally ill person can cope with losing friends. The best I can come up with is to keep making friends, treat them well, and do your very best to be totally treatment-compliant. Losing friends sucks, but in the end, any so-called friend who can’t cope with someone having an illness that is completely not their fault is likely someone you wouldn’t want to be friends with regardless.

Best wishes dear readers! For those of you who enjoy my writing and have yet to subscribe, there may be something big coming with my blogs that will convince you it is a good idea. Also, for anyone who does subscribe and pays the full year in advance, I am happily going to provide you with digital copies of the three mental health books I mentioned above. Remember leif.n.gregersen@gmail.com if you want to get ahold of me.