Mental Illness and Love
Today I write about love. More specifically, the benefits of love for preserving mental health and recovery from mental illness when it emerges.
Before I begin it may help to define love. This is no easy task. Our cultures and civilizations have eternally spoken, written, painted and sculpted about what love might be.
Plato describes in The Symposium a case where people were originally “stuck together”, with two heads, four arms, four legs and so forth. Zeus, in one of his anger fits, divided this stuck together person in two. The resulting “half person” would constantly search for union with their “other half”. This was love? Or take Romeo and Juliet. Romeo takes his own life thinking his love, Juliet, was dead. Juliet, upon awaking from a death-like stupor, sees Romeo dead then takes her own life. These could be considered forms of romantic love.
But there are other loves. The love of siblings, the love of parent and child, the love of friends. Again, there are many examples of this kind of love, but I will limit myself to one that speaks to me – the love between friends of Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings. This love sees them through a dangerous journey into the heart of Mordor, the land of the evil Sauron. May I describe these kinds of love as “unconditional affection”?
But what is the relationship between love and mental illness?
Love can form a strong protective factor against mental distress. To be loved, and to know one is loved, helps provide self-esteem. This may protect against anxiety, depression and low self-worth. Knowing that there is someone, or some people, to catch you if you fall promotes healthy risk-taking, in turn allowing you to grow as a person. Being loved, especially at a young age, can give you the gift of self-love, leading to resilience and personal strength.
Love can also be vital in recovery. Again, the self-esteem arising from being loved is a robust resource that can help improve your mental health. Having people who love you around you can provide a safety net. They can help you regain a sense of mental balance, of support, of community. It may even help you by taking your attention away from difficult feelings and thoughts.
On a more concrete level, people who love you are more likely to provide you with the practical supports you may need for recovery. This may include things as simple as a ride to see a doctor, helping pay fees for mental health professionals, cooking and cleaning when you are not feeling well, or simply being there when you need to speak about your feelings in order to process them and, hopefully, regulate them.
There is one more benefit love can bring. Continuity. If someone loves you before a diagnosis and first emergence of symptoms of mental illness, and also loves you after these traumatic events, it provides a sense of continuity. This is vital to stop the feeling that you have become your illness, that you identify your whole personality with the one thing a doctor has diagnosed. It gives you a sense that you are just as valued, just as appreciated, just as important after diagnosis as you were before. This can be very important in the case of severe illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar and borderline personality disorder, where there may be a tendency for people to feel their entire personality is subsumed by their diagnosed illness.
Perhaps John Lennon got it part right when he sang “all you need is love”. There are certainly other relationships and feelings that play a part in mental wellness but love is definitely up there too.
Dr. Richard Schweizer, Policy Officer at One Door Mental Health richard.schweizer@onedoor.org.au.
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Dr Richard Schweizer