Principles for carers, relatives and friends

Here are 14 brief principles for people who care for or live with some one with mental health problems:
  1. Realise that severe mental illness is not rare. It may seem to be but that is because it’s “not talked about”. In the UK today, there are about 600,000 people with a severe mental illness and about 1,500,000 carers. All people like you who will face illness among family and friends.
  2. Get to know as much as possible, as soon as possible, about severe mental illness - use our section on Mental illnesses and disorders
  3. Never become a moth around the flame of self-blame: it can destroy your chance of coping, it can destroy you. Free yourself with the modern knowledge that severe mental illness cannot be prevented and is not caused by families.
  4. Seek helpers who are effective. Identify them by their compassionate natures, their ability to provide emotional support information presented sensitively.
  5. Accept that with illnesses as complex as severe mental illnesses, our natural instincts are not a reliable guide to caring and coping. Relatives and friends – the carers – do need training.
  6. Join an appropriate self-help group, see Carer support
  7. Get to know the origins of the pressures, the ever increasing pressures, to which carers are subject.
  8. Pay great attention to the needs of all members of the family and caring network.
  9. Take heed that constant unconditional self-sacrifice is fatal to effective caring and coping.
  10. Do not spend massive amounts of time with the person who is unwell.
  11. Look after existing and establish new friendships and activities that take you out of the house.
  12. Set your sights on the person who is ill achieving maximum independence from yourself, and on yourself becoming more independent from him/her.
  13. In the end it is the ability to change and adapt, and to look at things differently, that distinguishes relatives who will cope, from those who will not.
  14. Take very great care of yourself, see Looking after you

Based, with thanks, on “Coping with schizophrenia – a course for relatives”, The Mental Illness Fellowship of Victoria, Australia. Written by Dr Ken Alexander, Chief Research Fellow at EUFAMI, the European Federation of Families of Mentally Ill People [www].