As an addiction counselor with the adolescent treatment center House of Mercy, Addison McFerren worked with both patients and families to facilitate recovery. Addison McFerren maintains a particular interest in helping people understand how addiction and other mental illnesses affect a patient's family.
When someone with a family has a mental illness, others in the family struggle as well. Daily activities and special occasions alike can become extremely frustrating, as everyone involved must consider the intense and potentially unpredictable needs and behavior of the ill person. Families may feel ineffective in their attempts to protect the person from his or her own symptomatic behavior, and if patients are aggressive or threatening, family members may fear for their own safety.
For those family members who take on a caregiver role, meeting the patient's daily needs can be extremely time-intensive and thus emotionally and physically draining. Meanwhile, others in the family may feel consistently ignored and deprioritized. This can stress even strong family relationships and lead to resentment of the person with the illness.
The illness may also cause a pervasive grief among family members, who see friends living routine lives and feel the lack of such normalcy in their own lives. This is often worsened by the lack of social support that can be caused by the stigma of mental illness. Families retreat into the world of the illness and do not have the benefit of empathy from friends or social networks.
For these reasons, it is vitally important for all family members affected by mental illness to seek resources. Whether that is in the form of professional, spiritual, or social assistance, support of some form is crucial to a family's ability to meet their own needs as well as those of the ill loved one.
