Read personal stories written by people with experience of caring for someone with a mental illness, whether a family member, friend or other carer.
By: Anonymous
My son is just 14 as I sit to write this. He is an innocent, cheerful, sunny
teenager – about whom (as yet) none of the normal teenage horrors apply – except
for the monstrously untidy room.
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By: Anonymous
When I was asked to write this letter, I promised myself I wouldn’t write a sad or angry letter, but this subject can make you sad, angry, weepy, hard, emotional, determined, obstinate, persistent, amazed and dumbfounded to name but a few!
Almost seven years after “the world came crashing down around our ears” we,
as a family are still here AND ‘coping’.
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By: Anonymous
If you are anything like me, your mind will have been too numb to take in
much of what the consultant said after the word ‘autism’. I entered
the clinic with my sweet though puzzling 3 yr-old and left holding the hand
of a little stranger.
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By: Anonymous
At the moment of diagnosis I think the world spun on its axis. There had been a long build up period of concerns being voiced but this was it.
Initially it didn’t make much sense – I didn’t know what
autism was or what it meant in relation to my son.
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By: Christine Davies
My husband suffers from bipolar disorder. I suffer from him suffering from bipolar disorder. We have been married nearly 17 years and he was only diagnosed 18 months ago.
It explained a lot of his bizarre behaviour over the years and how we grew apart and slept in separate bedrooms for years.
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By: Laura Axton
Oh my god, I think mum is ill again. She seems really happy and full of energy. She seemed to have laughed a little too long at that joke. Oh my god...mum is singing!
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By: Anonymous
My son Anthony is 23 - he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when he was 20. He wrote this poem.
I am a label, bipolar maybe worse,
they don’t know the glue has not stuck.
I am a number
section 2 or maybe 3
Depends which doctor you see.
I am a prescription,
collect drugs with names it’s hard to say,
but still I am to swallow them each day.
I am a fear,
One of them who hear voices.
The others, the scary ones,
The ones that should be locked away.
I am a survey
tick the boxes, dot the I’s
See it fits
you match the numbers on our sheet.
don’t deny it for it’s true,
We have a pigeon hole for you.
In another time, or other place
Would you make your mark upon my brain,
Would you send a shock through my skin?
Would you tie me up in your restraints,
would you throw away the heavy key and hide your eyes so you don’t see?
I am tired
Not a threat,
I hear the whispers, mocks and laughs,
somereal some I am told imagined.
Never private, never free
I am my illness, never me.
Written by Anthony Reid aged 23
How do I feel as his mum? Like most parents I feel guilty, could I have done anything different that might have helped him.
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By: James Baxter
My sister has a severe mood disorder [bipolar disorder]. Like a little boat on heavy seas she bobs about on the crests and troughs of her moods.
Of course I love her, she's my sister.
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By: Fiona Brown
Almost immediately after my marriage, my husband began to display signs of severe mood swings. One minute he would be completely elated, the next he would plummet into a dark mood.
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By: Luke Brown
My step-Dad looked after me since I was seven and my sister was six. He was good fun at first - always laughing and playing games with us - but then, for no reason, he would turn nasty and not speak.
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By: Sandra Daines
Providing care for someone is stressful and pressurising. Every carer needs ways of dealing with this stress. Whether it be finding your own quiet space for some relaxation or doing things you find relaxing.
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By: Sara Roberts
My greatest cause of frustration is other people’s attitudes to my daughter. By this I mean members of her family. These attitudes I feel are brought about by a lack of knowledge of the whole situation.
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By: Helen Berg
My partner James and I had been together for two years when we married and by this time had founded our own home improvements company. James, with all the ideas and practicalities and me running the business.
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By: Madeleine Vose
I am a support worker with women with mental illness and am working in this field because I have recovered from a brief, but severe, bout of psychosis and a year of clinical depression.
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By: Anonymous
Our son came home from work and was acting very strange, not talking or reacting to anything we said to him. This went on for a couple of weeks, then we were advised to let him go into the psychiatric hospital, he was having a breakdown.
Our family was distraught.
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By: Anonymous
I am a 32 year old woman of asian origin who was born to a mother diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and severe obsessive compulsive disorder and a violent alcoholic father who died of alcoholism three years ago.
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By: Rosalind Smith
When I realised that my daughters’ schizophrenia was going to be permanent, I started to force myself to go out. I could no longer work from home because my daughter had become increasingly violent and abusive towards me.
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By: Roger Jones
There was a time, about twenty years ago, when I would have run a mile just seeing our son. We couldn’t cope, we were hurt, guilty, didn’t understand and quite frankly we were sometimes afraid of him.
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By: Kath Ryan
The sadness of witnessing our son’s prolonged descent into paranoia from the age of fourteen until his diagnosis at twenty-two was almost impossible to bear. In hospital he struggled for five years, made several suicide attempts and endured ECT.
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By: Sharmila Sengupta
My husband Ash was a software engineer by profession. I became increasingly concerned when he began to behave totally out of character- spending huge amounts of money, partying non-stop, and drinking excessively.
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By: Terry Hammond
Monday
It’s strange being a carer. I had always thought of carers as being
Mother Theresa type characters. The truth is I feel more like a headmaster
at a school for difficult children.
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By: Margaret Newman
For about 10 years my son James has been mentally ill on and off, detained under the mental health act many times and spent months in hospital including two long periods in an intensive care unit.
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By: Susan Hodgson
As a young child my son seemed different from other children. He didn’t make friends as easily as his brother and he had reading difficulties. But I couldn’t actually pinpoint what his problems were.
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By: Hazel Ruane
Carers` Support Groups arose because many individuals found themselves having to cope with mental illness in the family and they did not know where to turn for help.
This gradually led to the establishment of a network of Carers` Support Groups throughout the country.
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By: Pat Tucker
If I knew then what I know now would he have stood a better chance? If they had diagnosed his illness earlier and treated him earlier would things be better now? If I had put the pieces of the jigsaw together quicker would I have been able to get him to a doctor sooner? Questions, questions, a few of many over the years.
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By: Rose Barber
One hard lesson that I have had to learn is that it is very important to take care of myself.
In the first counselling session I had, the counsellor asked what were MY
needs.
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By: Carla Passino
My brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was 17. The illness had overshadowed most of his teenage years, but we hadn’t yet put a name to it. He dealt with the illness with extreme dignity and quietly coped with unimaginable experiences.
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By: Kim Ashby
Ben had been sociable and outgoing in his early teens but after a period
of smoking a lot of cannabis he went downhill rapidly after his GCSEs though
he attained the ten A grades predicted.
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By: Helen Berg
My son has schizophrenia. One of the horrendous things about his illness is the isolation. He has no friends. He constantly tries to contact old friends but then cannot sustain the effort.
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By: Helen Berg
Stigma is still very much around. However, having dealt with the problem for over twenty years I have become very easy with telling people that my son has schizophrenia. It has become so clear to me that this is an illness the same as any other and I find that all my friends seem to have learnt that this is so and they only sympathise with the stress and strain involved.
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By: Edmund Clarendon
There is stigma, or varieties of social aversion attached to both those with mental health problems and their carers. In our medieval past, ‘madmen’ and ‘madwomen’ were placed on board a ship known as the ‘Ship of Fools’ on the river Rhine and abandoned.
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By: Edmund Clarendon
My wife and I found caring for our mentally ill son both physically wearing and psychologically stressful. Even our marital relationship has come in for a severe bashing as each partner sees the day-to-day management of caring for Brian differently.
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