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The Unique Struggle of Mental Health Caregivers
8 million Americans provide care to someone with an emotional or mental health issue. Many, like myself, need more support.
My boyfriend fell into a deep bout of depression a few years ago, and I found myself negotiating the illness’s tenuous boundaries: deciding when to drag him out and when to leave him alone, reminding him how much I loved him, expecting nothing more from him than the perfunctory motions of life. I wanted him to be better so badly, and I thought, if I could just figure out the right thing to do or say, he would be. I “knew” a lot about depression, namely that trying to love someone out of it is as futile as trying to love someone’s diabetes away. Yet that’s exactly what I did.
According to a 2016 study, there are an estimated 8.4 million Americans who provide care to an adult with an emotional or mental health issue. Of those people, 74% report feeling high emotional stress, and only one in three are themselves in “excellent or very good health.” Mental illness doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and its effects reverberate. Those effects are particularly pernicious when it comes to marriages: Another multinational study found that of the 18 mental disorders that were found to be linked to higher divorce rates, major depression was among the top…
