It's Not Your Fault!

It catches me by surprise each time someone talks about their guilt and their sense of blame for their mental illness. It happens in conversation all the time and I notice it. I notice it in our family group or, like yesterday, when I enquired about how another person's life is going. You know the conversation, how's work, how are the kids, what's new at home, those kind of things. If I see signs of stress I'll make sure to ask how someone is. Stress, as we all know, is the killer and I always try to give the person a chance to unburden. So I ask and they say, “Well, you know, I'm having trouble with the younger one, I think he might have some mental problems and you know I had some similar problems when I was raising him and I feel bad for some of things I did when I was sick and how they affected him and I carry a lot of guilt for….” That's when the epiphany comes, this person feels guilty for having a mental illness, for believing they've deliberately damaged their families and that they chose to do it. When I start hearing this I stop it right then.

I say “Wait, wait, wait, this is not your fault.” The person will ask “What do you mean?” Then we'll have the conversation about mental illness being a disease and that there's a genetic basis for the distorted information flow in the brain. That distorted information becomes the muddled and wrong thinking that goes into the decisions one makes…and one regrets. The decisions you make become the cumulative results of your life and the lives of those you love. If it's a parent I'm talking to I talk about the inability to predetermine hair color, immunity to asthma or even gender so why should you hold yourself responsible for the genetic combination that predetermines mental illness?

Then there will be another conversation that is either “Oh yeah, I know all that, but….” or “I never thought of it that way.” In both cases the reinforcement needs to come. “It's not your fault. It's ------not ------your------ fault.”

Our society has held millions of people hostage by inferring or even saying outright, that we, or our parents, or someone else close to us has done something to cause our mental illness and by extension, the symptoms that go with it. Responsibility for having a mental illness is implied in so many ways. It's implied every time we ask about childhood trauma, consider our experiences growing up or even when we judge behaviour, ours or another's, from a criminal perspective rather than as a medical condition; A condition which is identified by symptoms of muddled thinking, poor decision making or even the psychosis that might explain the behaviour.

If you have one of these diseases, or if one of your direct relatives does, give yourself permission to let up on yourself. It's a real disease; it's not communicable and regardless of what you have been told, directly or indirectly . . . . . . It's Not Your Fault.