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Hope and expectations
Mental illness can be difficult and distressing for everyone that it affects, but things can get better. You may have certain expectations on what recovery might mean for your sibling and this can also change over time. Learning about the directions mental illness can take can help you manage your expectations.
What is recovery?
Recovery means different things for different people. When your sibling first becomes ill, you can find yourself feeling fear that they will never get better, or hopeful that things will get back to the way they were.
When thinking about recovery, it is important to allow yourself to first accept that your sibling is ill, and that mental illness will have changed someone, whether in positive or negative ways. Mental health problems can bring about a great change in someone's life, and it can just as much lead to difficult feelings and emotions such as social anxiety or depression, as positive outcomes such as gaining a greater insight into your mental health and the world around you.
It can also help to think of mental health as something that is on a continuum. You could find yourself thinking of your sibling as either 'ill' or 'not ill' at any one time, but mental health is something that can go up and down in all of us, and this is no less the case for someone who is experiencing a mental illness. It can take time, learning and trying different things for someone to gain the balance that is right for them.
“I always just wanted things to get 'back to normal', and we learnt together that things could get better, and that didn't mean things had to be continuing on the same path as before he became ill.”
What is a good quality of life?
There is no one experience, no one outcome, but a spectrum of experiences and outcomes that can follow from someone's recovery journey. For instance, when we might talk about our brother or sister recovering a 'good quality of life', this will be different for every person. Some people might get back to work and feel that is a big part of their recovery, while for others, it might be steps such as being able to socialise with others again.
Recovery as a concept is about the process of building a meaningful life as defined by the person with a mental health problem themselves.
There are four key component processes suggested:
- Finding and maintaining hope
- The re-establishment of a positive identity
- Finding meaning in life
- Taking responsibility for one’s life
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