Thursday, October 29, 2026
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Relationships

Partners, parents, friends and colleagues: the people around a diagnosis, and how care actually works between them.

Relationships and Serious Mental Illness: What Partners, Parents and Friends Get Wrong
Relationships8 min read

Relationships and Serious Mental Illness: What Partners, Parents and Friends Get Wrong

Loving someone through a serious mental illness comes with no manual, so most people improvise — often getting it backwards in ways that come from fear rather than carelessness. From constant symptom-watching to total avoidance, here's where good intentions tend to go wrong, and what actually seems to hold these relationships together.