Mental Disorders Are Not Character Defects
By: Bob Wakefield
Tags: Mental Health Awareness, Mental Illness, Mental Health

You are not your disorder.

“I don’t think I have a problem.” — people with serious problems

I can’t believe that in 2020 I have to write this article. However, someone dropped in my FB comments and made several ignorant statements that alluded to the idea that having a mental disorder meant someone had bad character. Honestly, it was clear this person wasn’t that bright, but I can’t let this go. It’s too important.

Having a mental disorder does NOT make you a bad person!

Having a mental disorder is NOTHING to be ashamed of. The very idea that, in this day and age, there is still stigma around these issues is effing ridiculous.

Having a mental disorder says nothing about your character. How you deal with your disorder says EVERYTHING about your character.

Having a mental disorder is like anything else in life. It’s not about the cards you’re dealt. It’s how you play them. Assuming you realize you have a problem you’ve got two options: deal or deny.

Choosing To Deal

When you recognize that you have a problem, the first step is not:

1. Googling symptoms

2. Asking your friends opinions of what you might have

Unless your friends lived with/loved someone with a mental disorder, have been diagnosed with a mental disorder, or are a mental health professional, they have no business advising you on what you may or may not have.

Googling symptoms is also not helpful. The reason being the actual first step in choosing to deal is taking your ass to a mental health professional and having an honest conversation about what is going on with you.

That’s key. You can’t walk into the doctor’s office and tell them what you THINK you have. You need to describe SYMPTOMS and then let them reach a conclusion based on a differential diagnosis (ddx).

The ddx is important because mental disorders have overlapping causes. Highly overlapping actually. The Venn Diagram of symptoms and causes is quite the mess. Another reason why WebMD is not your friend here.

Depending on what you have, your doctor will get you on a treatment plan. Now you can get on a path back to having a healthy normal life.

By the way, it is TOTALLY possible to have a healthy, happy, normal life with a mental disorder. That is not always true. However, the grand majority of conditions just require therapy/and or pharmaceutical intervention. You just have to understand that there is no “cure” for mental conditions per se. You have to get on your regimen and commit to leading a mentally healthy life.

Choosing Not To Deal

This is what makes you an asshole. Having a problem and ignoring it. However, choosing not to deal is a bit nuanced when it comes to mental health issues.

I used to have frequent conversations with a person that I cared about deeply about her mental health. I had to be extremely careful about what I said because I wanted to keep her engaged and not upset her. I spent a large part of 2020 walking on eggshells with this person, but that is another story.

One of the things I frequently talked about was the fact that the human brain has no self-diagnostic function. Whatever your brain is interpreting as reality, that is your reality. If you have a mental disorder that distorts reality, it can be difficult to determine what is real and what is not. That makes it difficult to determine if you actually have an issue or not.

If you’re lucky enough to be self-aware enough to understand that you have an issue and you take a pass on dealing with it, you have now crossed into bad person territory.

I’m completely aware of the fact that one of the reasons I got left was because I made her face her issues. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she told me once. Yeah, it’s hard. You know what’s harder? Going through life living a degraded lifestyle, being less than who you could be. That is literally harder from so many stand points.

If you choose not to deal, you may not be able to hold down a decent job and have to take a job significantly beneath your intellectual capability. You may not be able to form appropriate bonds with people. You may engage in harmful, hurtful, self-destructive behavior. The list goes on.

What To Do When Your Partner Won’t Deal

I spent a large fraction of 2020 trying to convince someone that they had a problem and that they needed to go to therapy. That was my personal choice. It was a personal choice that wound up being extremely harmful to me, but I would do it all over again because she’s worth it. Every human being is worth my best efforts to help them.

Don’t wait for someone to ask for help. That’s insane. Interventions exist for a reason. Also, helping someone with a serious issue is just being a good human being.

That said, you need to set some boundaries on yourself. I spent most of 2020 being totally delusional about my tactical situation. My situational awareness about my relationship with someone was out the window and I got blown out of the sky because of it.

In a moment of clarity, I once told her, “I can’t force you to be happy. You have to choose it.” If you have someone in your life that is actively fighting against getting better, you need to decide what your acceptable losses are. If you don’t, there will come a point where you wind up combat ineffective and you’ll be forced to withdraw. From a relationship perspective, fighting retreats are pretty bloody.

To talk about this in more concrete terms, at some point, their toxic behavior is going to negatively impact you. I know you care about the person. Believe me, I understand. But at some point, you may have to save yourself. Think about what’s happening to you and decide how much you’re willing to put up with. When that point is reached, you have to walk away. You need to make an agreement with yourself and actually keep it. If you don’t set that boundary, you will wind up drowning in someone’s dark crap and then you’ll be the one in therapy.