To feel hurt my best friend ditched me while I was sectioned?

That's also true.

People that mentally unwell, as you must have been, are incredibly difficult to deal with. Families often have to deal with it. Friends don’t.

Sadly some people just cannot cope with it. I think it is a fear of mental health. Hope you got other support. When you have MH problems you find out who your friends are

I hope you are doing better now. I don't know what happened in your case, but in my life I have had to cut off family members with very serious mental illness because after decades of support, it becomes unsustainable to deal with the fallout of another person's mental health. It may be your friend took steps to protect herself that she felt were essential. Concentrate on your own healing, and try not to fixate on your friend's choices.

I'm sorry to hear what you've been through, OP, it sounds like hell. 💐You might want to ask MNHQ to move this to the mental health section, AIBU tends to just attract pile-ons from people who've never been through it and enjoy kicking people when they're down.

OP I’m sorry you’ve had a difficult time, and I’m glad you’re feeling better now.

As hard as it was for you, it would also have been hard for your friend.

I would suggest you read the current “my husband was sectioned” thread, to get an idea of how it feels from the other side.

The issue with this is that everyone else has their own mental health to take care of as well.

A person has a mental illness and then everyone else is expected to act perfectly all the time when realistically they might not have the knowledge or capacity to do so.

We all only human and there is only so much we can cope with, we have to allow each other grace.

Yes, I agree. Also, I'm not referring to someone just feeling a bit down (which a friend can absolutely help with), the OP refers to a "severe" mental health crisis which required being sectioned (hospital treatment).

It's ludicrous to think a lay person or friend can assist with this- they dont have the necessary mental health skills or qualifications to do so. It's like expecting one of my friends who isnt a qualified doctor to conduct heart surgery on me or to expect my friend who isnt a doctor to fix my broken leg for me. Noone would then pressurise that friend and call them cruel or mean for not operating on me so I dont know why this is any different.

You cannot expect your friends to be substitute therapists. No matter how much they care for you, they arent qualified to do that and actually, they could even make the crisis worse if they come charging in with unqualified "help".

Firstly I'm really sorry and glad you are feeling better.

It's hard. Mental health is really really hard as often the person having the breakdown is awful to be around. And as the person witnessing, it can be very difficult to separate the person and the illness.

My mother has very bad mental health and has been sectioned several times. Sometimes it's taken me years to speak to her again, as she has said and done such horrible things when she's been unwell. Yes, I know it's the illness, but it still hurts!

I'm sorry this happened to you, but some people just can't hack it sadly.

There's your side of the story, hers, and the truth is probably somewhere in between.

Some people (with or without severe MH issues) don't realise the impact that they have on others. None of us will ever truly know what goes in inside anybody else's head. I quit a friendship some time ago because she made a choice that I considered to be unforgiveable. It wasn't a choice that affected me, but it was one that I felt very strongly about due to it's impact on somebody else. She doesn't know to this day that I've decided to end our friendship, she thinks we've just drifted and I'm busy, and I'm sure she'd be blindsided if I ever need to tell her why.

Some otherwise good friends are just shit when you're ill.

Some otherwise good people do not handle mental health conditions in others well.

OP, I read all your posts now, and I’m incredibly sorry for what you’ve been through. Covid has made health anxiety a much, much bigger issue than it used to be, and hopefully that means more can be done to study it and find solutions that work. Unfortunately, a lot of research is done in the US, and they’ve removed federal funding from almost all of it (if they’ve completely cut funding to research into childhood cancers, then they’re not going to give a fuck about adult mental health).

I was so fortunate in comparison to so many on this thread. When I had a breakdown, I was in a non-UK, non-US country. A psychiatrist was called, who agreed to see me immediately, and prescribed emergency tablets for anxiety as well as talk therapy. I have been “on” the tablets since roughly 2018, in talk therapy just as long, and I’m happy to say that at this point, I need maybe 2 tablets a month under normal circumstances. But there may still be “stressful” times where I need more; anxiety is a lifelong battle a you essentially become like an alcoholic - one “drink” (A&E visit, unnecessary doctor call, afternoon-long jag of crying) is too many, and you need to call for support BEFORE you pick up the drink.

Allowing health anxiety to get to the point where it’s consuming your entire life, multiple A&E visits, multiple GP calls and visits seems incredibly strange to me; I can’t imagine how hard it must have been, and it will be a while until you determine the full effects of being in crisis that long, on you and your loved ones. Maybe you had capacity, OP, but it sounds like someone should probably have sat you down and had an intervention long before it got to the point that it did. I can imagine that if you were still insisting you were dying whilst being sectioned, it must have been very difficult for your children (as well as the adults in your life).

And for the record, your children will have been much more affected than you think. Please keep an eye on them and consider if they need counseling too. Also, health anxiety is something that is REALLY difficult for some people to have sympathy about, because it’s so clearly logical to them that you’re fine that it makes people with it often seem like they don’t want to hear that they’re well. This isn’t the case; the problem is just that anxiety is a liar and a thief. It’s telling you you’ll never feel any better, while simultaneously stealing your life away.

Telling your friend that you understand how hard it must have been to witness your breakdown and you understand why she had to pull away, may be a good source of closure for you both.

I stepped away from a friend who was subsequently sectioned.

I tried for a long time to be a supportive friend but I got to the point where supporting her was so all consuming it was having a detrimental impact on my own mental health and she behaved really awfully to me - I appreciate this was quite probably as a result of her mental health issues but there is only so much I was prepared to take.

Several years later she got back in touch; she was in a much better place and was able to acknowledge that she'd behaved badly towards me and it was unfair of her to expect so much of me.

OP - I suspect you are not being objective about your own behaviour and how much your friend did support you. Allow yourself to heal first.

I had a MH breakdown a couple of years ago.

i was a fucking nightmare. I’m amazed that some of the people around me at that time can even bear to speak to me.

obviously it was a fucking nightmare for me too and I never want to go through anything like it again but I am so so embarrassed by what I did and how I behaved.

Absolutely this, and as above it is NOT HELPFUL to keep telling people “absolutely they are wrong for not accepting your behaviour, they should accept however you behave and if they don’t they are terrible!”

Mental illness is awful. Really awful. Awful to experience if you're suffering from it and, frankly, awful to witness, and awful to support because by definition all the 'normal' boundaries don't apply.

It might help to think of this friendship as one victim of this horrible illness that you have suffered, OP. I think it's fine to feel hurt and offended and maybe if she took time to explain her side and hear yours you would understand each other, but if she doesn't have the capacity to do that (because it was too much, or because she couldn't understand, or your illness hurt or, yeah, just because she's horrible though I think that's unlikely) you have to accept that. It is very hard but it sounds from your description like one of the less hard hard things about the illness from which you're recovering to be perfectly honest, and you got through the worst of it too.

So sorry you were ill.

A lot of people don't understand mental illness

Even if you do understand it, it's still hard to deal with it though. You can completely empathise with someone being unwell but still find their behaviour draining and difficult to deal with. Most of us arent trained therapists and are therefore ill equipped to get someone through a severe mental health crisis.

Thats not the job for a friend, its the job for a mental health professional.

A lot of people don't understand mental illness. They struggle to see that behaviour caused by the illness can be out of the person's control and see it as to do with character rather than health.
Sometimes this makes them make harsh and unfair judgement (like your friend who evidently felt you could have 'pulled yourself together' for your DC).
Sometimes it makes them shy away because they are frightened by the unpredictability, or no longer enjoy your company because of the way your illness makes you behave.
I'm sorry that you have been on the receiving end of this lack of understanding and stigma, but mental illness is poorly understood and difficult to navigate. I hope you have other people in your life who are aware and committed and who have been there for you. If you don't and are feeling isolated, support groups can be a good shout to meet new people.

Due to issues within my own family, severe ocd, electric shock treatment (all kept extremely quiet), someone being sectioned and an in law having serious issues, I’m extremely wary when someone mentions mh problems. This may make me very selfish, but I feel very strongly that I can’t deal so I would also potentially distance myself. I have very few close friends (ha, no wonder) Maybe your friend feels similarly?

Does she have things going on in her life? Sometimes it’s just too much to take on someone else’s problems too. Maybe she needed to take a step back. Sometimes coping with someone else’s situation can be draining. It’s often not that cut and dried.

I agree. I'm currently going through something similar with a close family member. They've decided that I've 'abandoned' them because I couldn't cope with hour+ long conversations, multiple times daily, and wouldn't travel to them on demand whenever they felt they needed support. This wouldn't be sustainable for a health person and I have fairly serious physical health issues of my own. But it's my fault apparently and actually engaging with professional services to get support is not something they're willing to do because family should 'step up'.

So I agree with the people who are saying that dealing with someone with serious mental health issues is very very hard and she may simply not have been able to cope any more. It doesn't necessarily make her a bad friend or a bad person. I think OP should be the one to reach out here.

I let a friendship slide when they were having poor mental health.She'd either be raging or crying and I came away from seeing her completely shattered from the emotional effort of trying to support her. The friendship was dead, it served her in that she got someone to sit there and listen but didn't work for me at all. I don't think she even realizes how bad it was or the impact it had on her family and her friends.

I'm sorry you've had such a tough time and hope you get the support you need.

I’m sorry, it is very painful when this happens. Of course you are ultimately better off without such people in your life. I don’t know why severe mental illness is viewed so differently from something like, say, epilepsy. Once I even heard of someone demanding that a person undergoing an episode of psychosis and in extreme distress should apologise for ruining a party! An illness affecting behaviour does not mean the behaviour is under the person’s control. I hope you continue to recover and that you have other people in your life who are not so prejudiced.

I have a close friend with health anxiety, which it sounds like has been in the background your whole life and come to a head when you were sectioned, is that right?

She might be a "bad friend," or she might have felt she had nothing more to give. It's interesting that you don't mention anything going on in her life, were you aware of her life or were you consumed by your own problems? This is not your fault, you didn't have the capacity either, but it would be interesting to hear what you think she got from the friendship.

It's only possible, IME, to be a good friend to someone with mental health issues, if you have the capacity yourself. There are times I have had to step back as I had real* health issues and a parent dying slowly and horribly, yet she would only ever talk about herself. My parents cancer was "triggering," for her, she could never visit me in hospital as she doesn't like hospitals (who does?) and thinks by even going into one someone will see something wrong about her and she'll be admitted and never leave. I was nothing more to her at these points than someone to reassure her and listen to her, I was under no illusions she gave a damn about me. I know that these phases pass and the right answer is to reiterate that it's anxiety not MS/cancer/organ failure etc, that is how I accept it and stay friends but it's not always easy to accept a very one sided friendship, whatever the reason.

The only way for you to move forward is to accept that it was too much for her, not that she was an awful person. That is going to sour all the nice memories you have as well and isn't really going to make you feel better long term. If you can reflect on what an undertaking it must have been to help you, then you can truly appreciate your family and friends that were there and how much they must love you.

*By real, I am comparing to the imagined illnesses from health anxiety, not mental health issues, which are also real