The Plea

I have a request, or even more of a plea for those of you who have a loved one struggling with mental illness. Please Trust Us. I know I recently posted something similar to this, but it is important enough to warrant another post.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the reason so many of us feel forced to keep our illness a secret. We fear that if we’re honest about it we will lose what little control and relief we have over our lives. We are utterly terrified that as soon as people know, they’ll treat us differently, hide things from us, and that they’ll start rationalizing their choices by saying “Well I didn’t want to tell you, I didn’t want you to go kill yourself.”

I cannot begin to tell you the overwhelming amount of emotions that follow hearing that. Hurt, fear, disappointment, failure, betrayal and so many more emotions begin to strangle us. By saying this I am not hoping to coerce you into hiding that fear from us. I don’t want it to constantly be an unspoken fear in your mind, because that is just as poisonous to a relationship as saying those painful words.

What I want, what we all want, is for you to trust us. It has been almost six years since my suicide attempt, and it has been a year and a half since I stopped needing to take anti-depressants. Yet, just a month ago my life was turned upside down by those words. Someone I care about was knocked back by hearing the same thing recently. From our side, we can see how our history with suicide and depression can be worrisome for the people around us, put you still have to trust us.

We are strong. We are resilient. We know how to fight this illness and we know how to ask for help. Yes, we need your support, and yes there may be times where we come to you sobbing or enraged because our body chemistry is different and we need you to help us be strong, but the thing we need more than anything else, is your trust. If you can’t trust that we are okay and that we are strong enough to deal with suicidal feelings that may or may not ever return, then our relationship with you, whether you’re a friend, a parent, a significant other, or a relative, will not be able to survive.

Trust us, so we know that we can trust you.