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We're all different, let's not compare our illnesses
Posted Friday 10 August 2012
Living with a mental illness can be very painful and very lonely. Social media is a wonderful tool for many people because it’s a way of interacting with others who are in a similar situation. Through social media, we can form friendships and perhaps even discuss things which we wouldn’t feel comfortable doing face to face. We can find support from people who understand the difficulties that we face, and provide support for them in return. Social media can also help reduce the pain and loneliness associated with living with a mental illness and overall make it much more bearable.
Of course there can also be a downside to this as well. It can be easy to compare ourselves to others when we’re talking about mental health problems – particularly those who have the same diagnosis as us. We can find ourselves thinking things such as:
- “Why is it that they seem to cope better than me, when they have the same illness?”
- “That person experienced such trauma in their lives and yet they seem to manage much better than me. I don’t remember experiencing any trauma, so why am I such a mess?”
- “How is that they can manage a career and family, when I can barely manage to get up out of bed in the morning?”
There are endless comparisons that I could think of, and I’m sure you have plenty of your own you could add.
But why make comparisons? After all, mental illness isn’t a competition to see who copes best. And don’t we all have different illnesses? Two people might have the same diagnosis, but I don’t believe that two people ever have the same illness because everyone’s illness is individual to them.
I don’t think two people ever have the same symptoms, or the same personality, or the same experiences or support, the same skills or the same resources available to them. And it’s these things which make our illnesses unique to us.
People can also compare themselves in terms of how well they cope and they can be really worried about whether they are coping better or worse than someone with the same problem. Lots of questions can pop into our minds like:
- Does another person’s illness leave them unable to work?
- Are they able to maintain relationships?
- Are they classed as a suicide risk?
But these are all external factors and we can never really know what an illness feels like to each individual person. We see what people let us see, through social media or through talking to each other in other ways, but we’ll never be able to know exactly what they are going through all the time.
Comparing ourselves is so easy to do, especially when we’re going through similar things as each other, but I think it’s really important to remember that it isn’t a competition. We all cope differently and have different experiences because each of our illnesses are unique to us, they all affect us differently and our lives are different from each other’s because of this. So let’s support each other through our problems and not feel intimidated or under pressure by people’s different experiences. We’re all different and we all need support to help each other through!
Amanda
For more from Amanda, visit her website.
If you are looking for support to cope with a mental health problem, why not contact our infoline team to ask about services in your area - 0300 123 3393 / info@mind.org.uk?
12 Comments
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Thank you Amanda you make a really good point here which needs to be said.I believe these comparisons have, in part, been fostered by the current political climate of divide and rule which dictates everyone is only worth their economic productivity and distress/disability is a mere attitude. The fight to obtain access to any service, welfare, and housing with high eligibility criteria's pit people against each other. The relentless 'anyone on benefits is a fraudulent scrounging feckless waster' mantra pits people against each other. The struggle to obtain and maintain paid work against a backdrop of little support and discrimination encourages the outlook of needing to appear robust in the face of anything and everything so any chink in the armour becomes 'weakness'.
'Recovery' - which is politically defined embodies mentalist judgements - you are recovered/ing, laudable and worthy if you are not using services, and employed. Some within the independent profit making sector can also be judgmental of those who take medication. It saddens me when I listen to people struggling even within user groups referring to feeling substandard or put down by their peers for not being robust/productive enough and it can sound little better than a 'pull yourself together and recover or you're lazy' attitude.
Politics and recovery has caused this because there was never this kind of divide, judgement and comparison in previous decades where there was appreciation and acceptance of everyone's contribution whether it was paid or unpaid. Some people progressed to full-time paid employment, others did not, whereas now voluntary work can be frowned upon as lazy unless it progresses to paid work, it's no longer accepted as an outcome.
Continued... -
We shouldn't ape medical, political, and entrepreneurial masters and value each other irrespective of service use/diagnosis/medication and how much tax we pay.
Services don’t help this judgmental divide with this arbitrary ‘serious mental illness’ carving up who’s ‘serious’ and who’s trivial in their expressions of distress. We have been conditioned to treat certain diagnoses as deadly serious and others as jokes. So we must all take each other seriously according to something really simple – if a person says this hurts and hinders my ability to cope and live - then it’s serious for them and should be good enough for anyone else.I do get the ‘how come this person could do exams from hospital on a section when I couldn’t’ thinking, but we each respond differently, it doesn’t make anyone weaker/better for doing so.
There is however a difference between services getting people in their formative years rather than later in life when friends, education, career, housing might have been long established. That’s an acknowledgment [not a judgement] worth stating because those who claim that anyone can do what they’ve done can miss several points in this respects.
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I agree that we are all different in how we deal with a mental health condition but I think it shows, alas, how mental illness is portrayed in the media and history as if it is a condition in its own right. So different with physical conditions such as MS, Parkinsons Disease, Arthritis, Stroke, cardiac conditions, broken bones etc. as the general public see these as different and unique. If you listen to people chatting in a GP surgery its always something like: "my arthritis is getting worse and my diabetes is causing problems and I've got sinusitus but its all due to getting old". Still mental illness is thought of as 1 condition even though we who live with it known it is not. I also wonder why with physical conditions we are grouped as patients yet if it is mental ill health or learning disability we are called service users surely we are patients as well.
As youy rightly state we are all individual and unique and one day I hope will be treated equally by our health system. -
Under resourced mental health services are a major factor. It is so difficult to get a service and to be taken seriously. I know in the past I had times when I compared myself with others with whom there could almost be a competition for staff time and scarce help available. I find it painful to remember that I did this in my life as it had a great cost personally. It still seems so random who qualifies for support and that has to be cut down to the bare minimum due to the economic climate.
Mental health services also lump people with the same diagnosis together - this applies to the new clustering system. It goes that if you have a diagnosis of personality disorder it's seen as best practice if you go into a specialist PD service or get discharged quickly. There is no choice of therapy or help for many people - stereotypes are used by doctors too. I don't think it always helps to treat like with like as it's hard not to compare in treatment settings like therapeutic communities where one group crisis follows another.
It would make it worse when it is survivors who compare or go by the professional kind of hierarchy of diagnosis. There should be universal respect that we each find our own solutions.
Mental distress and suffering are all consuming and people need time to recover. Labelling and dictating what we can do to recover from these problems or for how long we deserve treatment is the wrong approach. Best to support eachother through difficulties - online and whenever we come together. -
This issue of comparison also applies to 'recovery' with people comparing themselves, i.e. not having ongoing problems/being very robust/not taking medication/not using services and being employed equating with good brave hardworking recovery and anything less equating with being lazy and not trying hard enough.
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I'm sorry, but I do make comparisons, because like Phil and Honest I'm fed up with being lumped together with others with totally different conditions. Not making comparisons sounds nice, but it's not the way the world works. Like it or not, comparisons are made all around us. The human brain works on a compare and contrast basis. If you can't compare things you can't recognise the difference between a table and a chair. If you don't compare people with different mental illnesses, you can't tell which one needs an antipsychotic and which one needs something to reduce the likelihood of further dementia-inducing strokes; and you can't tell the difference between the mate that needs a hug and the one that needs the door smashing down and an ambulance crew rescuing them.
Just because I have a mental illness does not mean that my condition is the same as that of everyone else with a mental illness and it doesn't mean that it is of the same severity as that of everyone else with mental illness.
Like it or not, I do make comparisons. I can tell the difference between a cat and a dog because I make comparisons. I can tell the difference between arthritis and measles because I make comparisons. I can tell the difference between bulimia and dementia because I make comparisons. We are not all the same.
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I agree there is great pressure to compare ourselves with others. When I first became seriously ill, my illness led to me losing everything that had become important to me, everything that made life worth living. I became suicidal. Yet, I remember some people (none sufferers) saying to me things like,'well at least your not in a wheel chair - you haven't lost your legs'. I remember thinking - losing my legs at that point might have been a bit of a God send as I wouldn't have to continually prove myself to the DWP and others. They'd be able to see my disability Instead of treating me like a bit of fraud. The medical profession would have taken me more seriously too.
At present we have this ideology from all the main political parties that says to have a sense of entitlement is anti social, anti democratic, or just plain wrong. As someone has already said, peoples worth has been reduced to their economic activity (or more to the point their lack of economic activity). Democracy has been replaced with a capitalism where practically every sphere of life is seen in terms of an economic value, where what we refer to as democracy is no more than 'manufactured consent'. Yet, before I became ill I was a healthy taxpayer for fifteen years. My children are healthy tax payers. I don't steal, I don't don't commit tax evasion, I take note of the speed limits and you'll never catch me using a mobile phone whilst driving. There are many other things I could site where my individual commitment to the smooth running of society could be proved. This is my allegiance to the community. I even belive that smiling at people and saying hello in the street is of great worth. Yet, the government states that I am economically invalid cause I don't have what they see as a proper job/roll in the system. So when I help my neighbours with practical tasks or just spending company with them, I'm deemed as less worthy cause they are jobbed up and I'm not.
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Hi David.
I get your point, but surely the idea would be that we are all individuals therefore our illnesses are unique to us, and as you say lumping those with the same illness together doesn't work.
We are all individuals with different illnesses, so I don't believe that comparing our illnesses in terms of either coping better or worse than someone else, or even having a more or less severe illness than someone else, works.
Kind Regards
Amanda -
Re 'also applies to 'recovery' with people comparing themselves, i.e. not having ongoing problems/being very robust/not taking medication/not using services and being employed equating with good brave hardworking recovery and anything less equating with being lazy and not trying hard enough. '
... Exactly. That was kinda my point, but maybe I did a very poor job of making it, sorry.
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I don't think anyone would argue with recognising difference, it's value based comparisons Amanda and others are referring to, i.e. it's not 'serious' unless you have these diagnoses and take or do XYZ, and you're not a member of the recovering club unless you do/don't do XYZ.
I'm not above comparisons - it irks me when celebrities who have never used NHS mental health services claim to represent those who have, likewise those who have never even received a formal diagnosis or taken the treatments speaking as a person with a diagnosis recommending those treatments. I'm even more irked by those who do have experience of using NHS services and treatments claiming everyone can achieve what they've achieved, everyone can and should work and that's it merely down to negotiating your conditions i.e working from home, graded returns. Those of speak of this have typically never done low paid crap work with no sick pay where graded returns would be laughed at and working from home wouldn't apply.
I think Amanda's point was lets not do to each other what services and politics have done to us by classifying ourselves according to care clusters and economic productivity - and that doesn't mean we don't recognise the unique differences in how distress is expressed or the fact that one person may be at risk of falling off the cliff edge whilst the next is not. -
It bothers me when people with mental illness, who are anti-psychiatry and anti-bigpharma, judge the rest of us for being medicated. How dare they presume to know my journey or the journey of any one of us. And how dangerous it is for them to encourage vulnerable people to stop taking medication.
There are degrees of mental illness. Some people may need to be medicated in order to function. Others may do very well unmedicated by making lifestyle changes and learning various coping skills. These are decisions to be taken by a patient and his doctor.
There is "no one treatment fits all." If we want to end stigma against the mentally ill, we would do well to stop stigmatizing each other.
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I wish things would go back to 20 years ago. Then when I wwas ill I saw a consultant phsychartist and was admitted to hosptial who gave me time to recover.
Now it seems if you have the 'right' diagnosis you get this type of help otherwise you are left to struggle in the outside world who has already judged you years ago.
Professionals talke about 'the best bipolar Ive ever seeen' while at the same time washing their hands off women with PD to the point of telling them to discharge themselves. They are the wrost culprits
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