Mental-Health Monday

Over the past six years while I’ve been writing (read: not writing, or agonizing over) my memoir, I’ve heard from a lot of people about their own mental-health challenges.

Some of the challenges they describe are technically not their own; they have a parent, or sibling, or grandparent, or roommate, or fill in the blank, who experiences mental illness. They aren’t necessarily trying to say “Well, I’m not ill, but so and so is.” They simply aren’t accustomed to owning how stressful it can be to support a person who does have a mental illness, or is neurodiverse.

Yes, caregivers are people, too — and so are those who don’t have a clearly defined role as caregiver, but spend a lot of time with someone who is unhealthy and sometimes also not functioning well. Children. Friends. Roommates. Siblings. Nieces and nephews and cousins. When it comes to mental-illness episodes, not everyone can help. Not everyone should help.

But everyone should be able to get help. A child who sees a parent experiencing deep depression or mania, a sibling (whether young, or adult): These people should have support.

I am not an expert in childhood development or education, nor do I know a great deal about resources available to the innocent bystanders of mental illness. I can and should learn more about them. However, during my worst years of double depression, my spouse, who was also my caregiver, and I had a lot invested in not asking others for help — especially with our children. We wanted, I suppose, to seem “normal,” and we didn’t want to ask for too much or to cry wolf.

Our two children had support for challenges we considered “theirs,” like ADHD. But we should have found them support for their living with a severely ill parent. Sadly, as I’ve noted in my book and will probably talk about many times in the future, when a person is clinically depressed, many ideas and actions are unavailable to them. I was so busy thinking about my own survival that I didn’t think about theirs.

I’ll regret that forever. But I have to forgive myself so that I can think about our children now, give them all the attention I can, and encourage them to seek help when they need it for the times when I was not available.

If you are struggling with any kind of mental illness, I hope you have a caregiver, either in your family (biological or chosen), or a professional. I hope that your caregiver(s) and support team can help your own “innocent bystanders” with ideas for resources and care, too.

We’re all just walking each other home.