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5 Ways to Support Someone With a Chronic Illness
Living with a chronic illness doesn’t only affect you, but it has a massive impact on those around you who you love and care about. It is really tough to support someone with a chronic illness, and I do think it’s important to acknowledge that. As someone who has lived with people supporting someone with a chronic illness for years (see what I did there?) , I know the struggle. You want to be there for them, but you also want your own life. And balancing the two can seem impossible at times. You know how tough their life is, and how hard they find things that you find simple,…
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Living with a chronic illness is not ‘fun’
The title of this blog post may seem pretty obvious. You may have read it and thought ‘of course living with a chronic illness isn’t fun’, but its not the obvious I am going to talk about today. I often hear things like ‘at least you get to have a lot of sleep’ or ‘you get to spend a lot of time in bed’, as if these are things to be grateful for, or as if they are perks of my illness. And I know I am not alone in that. Comments like that arent meant to be offensive or insensitive. Often they are from people trying to support you,…
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Living with a Chronic Illness, Every Day.
Looking through past blog posts I realised that I’ve talked quite a lot about life with mental illness, but I haven’t really focused that much on the other evil in my life: my chronic illness. I was diagnosed with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) over 3 years ago now, and it’s been a rollercoaster ride ever since. There are so many new things to get used to, treatments to try, lifestyle changes to make. It’s something that you just can’t prepare for. I do count myself as very fortunate, because I know so many other sufferers of ME who aren’t able to work at all, and many who are bed bound. But…
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Things not to say to someone suffering with a mental health condition.
I know this topic has been covered time and time again, but I still think it’s an important one to cover, and to keep talking about. There are so many comments, or misunderstandings, that can have a severely negative impact on people who struggle with their mental health – and it keeps happening. It can be exhausting trying to explain to people why these phrases are so unhelpful, but it’s so important. A lot of the time people do think they are really helping, or they think they know better. But there are so many better ways to support people who are struggling, and it’s not hard to do them.…
