Mental Health

And no, before you say it, I don't mean my own (although it is questionable at times).  I struggle with other people's mental health issues, because what I want to say is 'Come on, you know you're nuts, right? You don't really believe what you're saying, do you?'.  I know that this is not a healthy, compassionate, supportive response and so I don't say it.  What I say is 'everything will be OK I promise' and then cry about it.  Which rather elongates the chain of mental health misery by becoming borderline depressed myself.
But when someone very close to you suffers from a mental health issue - and someone very close to me currently is and has had episodes of deep anxiety induced depression for many years - it affects everything, and there's almost nothing you can do.  Of course, I can alleviate as much stress or strain or worrying for that person as I possibly can; but the problem is that the sufferer can very easily replace those anxieties with a whole new set of completely irrational ones.  And the more irrational the worries or fears, the more difficult it is for me to help alleviate them.  So, bit of a vicious circle really, but I can't justify 'completely ignoring the entire problem' as an effective aid to rehabilitation.
The stigma attached to mental health is astounding and I don't just mean the obvious disabilities - ones which make a visual difference to the sufferer and cause people to point in the street.  But the secret, private miseries which can cause people to lead seriously limited lives and experience such debilitating problems are compounded by a general lack of understanding or even mild disinterest on the part of the rest of us. 
We can all do more, learn more, understand and accept more about mental illness; and just watching "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" does not count.
K x

P.S. 23/03/13  The above post was shorter than my usual fare, partly because I found myself getting angry and upset about the situation as I wrote it and also partly because I was exhausted and was losing my train of thought.  It's frustrating dealing with someone who is going through mental health issues because their understanding of the situation is fundamentally flawed by their illness.  You can't tell someone they are being irrational because the irrationality is part of the problem.  It makes it very hard to talk about, and very hard to write about because I want to justify every sentence with an example and I don't think that's fair on the person in question. Off to search for my magic wand now...
K x