Depression and the loss of friends

When I am at my lowest, I distance myself from the people I love. It’s a fact, I feel like I don’t deserve the friends I have and put too much pressure on friends to care about me. I think my depression and anxiety and my loss of friends come hand in hand, as I get more depressed, I get more sensitive and irritable, and become unbearable to be around. No one wants that in a friend, so when I need my friends most, I push them away.

Although I think a lot of my loss of friendship is self inflicted, there are places where people around me have triggered these issues. Once, at an extremely low point I received a message on twitter from someone I used to be close to, who I shared a lot with and who definitely took the brunt of a lot of my depression as a close friend, which is something i’m not proud of, and The message was a tweet from an account basically saying ‘just because you have mental health issues, doesn’t mean you friends have to put up with it’ paraphrasing obviously, as the tweet has since been deleted, but this was extremely painful to receive. I think this sent me deeper into a depression, and I think about that tweet all the time, at my lowest points I bring myself back to that, THAT is what my friends think of me, THAT is why everyone hates me. These are the times where I think, if my illness was visible, would I be treated the same? Or if my illness had more physical elements, would people treat me with more respect? No one would say the same thing to someone with epilepsy, who had fits around their friends and they had to look after them, why is it okay to do that to someone with mental health issues, maybe even to the same severity?

I think something that needs to be tackled when we are talking about the link between the loss of friends and depression is definitely the stigma around mental health, that it's something that isn't a genuine illness, that it can be easily fixed and that people are overreacting when experiencing mental illness. This uneducated dialogue is EXTREMELY damaging to individuals with mental health illnesses, and is definitely something that needs to be addressed. I think people need to act with a level of empathy when we are discussing mental health, if you haven't experienced severe mental health issues, that can be debilitating, then honestly you can't make judgements based on someone else's behaviour. Now, this does not take away from the fact that it is very difficult to be friends with someone who is severely mentally ill. It takes a lot of stamina and care to stick with them, so I do have a lot of empathy and care for those around me who have to deal with me when I'm unwell. It's not easy to be friends with me, at all. However, if I am struggling with staying alive, I have less time to focus on checking myself and my behaviour.

I struggle a lot with anxiety, to the point where I cry when I have to leave my house, or even my bed because I am so anxious. My anxiety is definitely crippling sometimes. This can be worsened by, with lack of a better word, bitchiness from a lot of people. I have spent a lot of time being ridiculed by friends for how I look, express myself and act. This stretches beyond little comments and conversations in groups I'm not involved in, to meeting up and not inviting me because ‘you wouldn't have wanted to come anyway’. This stretches into work based environments, specifically groups within the climate movement that bathe in toxicity and have become a breeding ground for my anxiety and made staying positive about my work and the importance of what I pride myself in, my one escape from my mental illness, impossible to do. My relationship with my anxiety now feels more trusted than mine with a lot of friends.

I think that the general loss of a few friends has created a general mental toxic culture for me when I think of friends, I think of people who will speak about me behind my back, mock me, people that don't actually want to be around me, because that's what depression WANTS me to feel. My illness wants me isolated, so I can bathe in my upset and never leave my house. There have been times during lockdown where I haven't left my house for weeks and havent showered for over a week. I wouldn't eat or eat too much and I would cry myself to sleep every night. But these things became the new normal, and my mental health deteriorated past the point of me being safe. Since lockdown started, I have been put under NHS mental health care.

One of the things I highlighted a lot to my doctors is how isolated and lost I am, how depression and anxiety has separated me from my friends who, although some try to be caring and understanding, will never really understand what its like to live a day in my brain. On the week I'm finishing this article, I have managed to go out and see people I trust 3 times, although still not comfortable around all the people I used to see, this was a massive achievement, and I'm so proud of myself to be able to see the start of the end of the tunnel.

Depression has torn my life, my relationships and my school life apart, but I can finally see the end to the destruction my illness as caused in my life, and I look forward to a happier, more comfortable future.

Fern Jameson-Green