Do you love someone with mental illness?

I find "word clouds" to be a fun visual way of learning about a topic without actually studying it. Take Mental Illness for instance. Even the term "mental illness" is laden with feelings of foreboding and hesitation.

WHY are we allowing the stigma of mental illness to control our education about it???

I guess we really never learn about something until we have to learn it in order to survive through it. I had never understood that a person could be "mentally ill", and setting aside all the childish classroom humor of other students being "crazy", "retards" or "weird", I always saw people as "people" and believed that everyone was different and that difference was what made the world an interesting place to live. Little did I understand that there is ACTUALLY an illness of the mind. 

The body has illness. We can see when we have a runny nose. We hear that we have a cough or strained voice. We FEEL the pain of overexertion and carry in the way we walk for others to see that "we don't feel well" for whatever reason. We can see the cast on someone's arm or scar which was wrought by a tragic injury. We even sympathize with ourselves and others when we "don't feel good". 

But what about a "mental illness"? It can be an invisible barrier between people; dividing families and binding up the minds of wonderful people who are in constant struggle and pain with an invisible enemy; their own mind. They may try to hide it from themselves within addictions; they are the most common with alcohol and drug abuse, eating disorders and addictions to nearly everything from smoking, video gaming and even something that may seem more accepted by society and even looked at as being positive traits like obsessive compulsive disorder, perfectionism and compulsive cleaning.  

I began to understand that I did not understand that MENTAL ILLNESS is real when I began to see OCD traits in my ex husband. When I mentioned his anger at me for not doing things as he did and that "I was ok just the way that I am" he would retort with hurtful and very extrapolated reasons as to how my behavior was not right and that his demands and anger over the salt and pepper shakers being set back into the cupboard where he found them was really a character flaw and evidence of my weakness as a person. 

I quickly realized that in some ways, he was not like me and the ways that he behaved seem unrational, unkind and very unloving but the purpose was for him to "feel good about himself". I realized this and began to explore the reasons WHY a person behaves this way. I started to learn about Obsessive Compulsive disorders that lead me into studying about Personality Disorders. I must have been on every website and forum and read nearly every book on these subjects in order to educate myself on "what had come into my home" under the guise of something lovingly accepted as "being his own person". We can "make allowances" for quirky behavior but when it crossed the line from quirky to abusive, THAT is when I started to listen to my heart and mind and start learning about mental illness...it is real. Sometimes we don't believe something exists until we "see it with our own eyes" and even then, we must brace against the tendency to deny it and delude ourselves into writing it off as "quirky behavior".

You have heard the saying "hurt people HURT people". I believe that this is true and probably truer for a mentally ill person than about anyone. They suffer daily. They may not realize at all that their behavior; their thoughts, their expectations and demands are putting a strain on their close relationships. They may have so much pain that they do not realize that they are "not emotionally connecting" to others as healthy people. 

If you are wondering why a loved one is miserable all the time, blames you for his/her problems, even says that YOU are "the problem" or that you are "mentally ill"...you can be sure that you love a very mentally ill person. Though they do not really intend to be so abusive, the unrequited love and lack of reciprocity in a relationship with a mentally ill person can suck the life right out of us if we allow it. Seriously, how can they have a relationship with us when all they find in us is fault (projection) and spending time with their addictions in order to cope? I have read about instances of severely addicted video gamers who admitted that their games were "the only joy they had". They hid the real reason for their misery in an addiction. This is a denial so great; that unless a mentally healthy person has direct contact in close relationship with a mentally ill person; we may not even give it another thought. It is "just the way he/she is" and since we don't have to deal with them all the time, we can "just live and let live". But for the person who is married to or in family relationship with a mentally ill person; the picture changes.

Educating ourselves about mental health and mental illness will help us recognize these traits in ourselves and others and enable us to live our lives to the fullest.