Depression and Friendship
I can pick up a phone and call my mom who lives on the other side of the province. I can send a message through Facebook to my sister who lives hundreds of kilometers away but I never hear from my “friends” who live in the same city as I unless they have a problem that I can solve.
They are known as fair weather friends those people who will stick close to you when everything is going well but will disappear in a heartbeat once the cloudy skies role in. All sorts of promises of continual support when the diagnosis first came down but as the fight went from a sprint to a marathon they become other faces in the crowd.
The key to defeating mental illness especially a disorder such as depression is not prescription medication or even therapy it is support. A therapist can reflect what you are feeling back to you so that you are able to see the whole picture and the prescription medication makes it possible to get out of bed and head to the therapist couch but neither has the same power as a system of support. People who remember you before the illness arrived and can bring back the feelings of normalcy when your world is in chaos. What may seem like trivial matters to them mean the world to us for we can concentrate on something other than the illness that is destroying our soul.
Walk into an emergency room for a mental health situation and they ask about people who can watch over you until the crisis has past and I stare at my shoes and admit 90% of my support system involves people who I would not recognize on the street and basically all that I know of them is their online user names.
I have a bunch of fair weather friends who will probably reappear when the clouds go away but the new version of me is a person they do not know and the old version of me died a lonely painful death. Take care.
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This post resonates in me because it describes my situation so well, and you’re right, support is so vital to a person going through the pain of a mental illness.
other than my bf, my only friend is an online friend. and a few onliners that are sorta friends.
That’s interesting to me because if I were to broadcast far and wide the equivalent of “Help, I have a gun to my head” I’d get lots of help and solicitude, both online and IRL. I’ve already seen this from when I was hospitalized. What I need is people who will be friends with me on a day-to-day basis to help keep me stable. People seem too busy to maintain friendships any more.