People who abandon a chronically/seriously unwell friend. Why does this happen?

[MonsteraDeliciosa]

I had typed out my loooong story but didn’t want to bore you with the details; and having read of similar on here and elsewhere before, realise the actual details are unimportant.

There is a common phenomenon of people abandoning or stonewalling close friends who have developed serious or chronic illness, and/or have become less physically able.
Why is this? It is so cruel. I can’t understand it and my heart is breaking for someone I love who is being similarly treated.

Does anyone have any insight into this?

As are you, I've no doubt 💜

We have backed off seeing a friend who now isn’t able to acknowledge us, converse with us or have any empathy with us. He’s very disabled and has dementia amongst a host of other things and we can see it’s a nightmare for them. They are well off but won’t pay for help. The wife keeps asking friends to do jobs in the bungalow, but we are in our 70s. DH helped them move in, which should have been done years earlier but they denied anything was wrong. DH had already put up grab rails and tried to help in their previous house.

He’s now just made to feel he’s never done enough and others have done more. We just don’t need the extra work that they could pay for. They are well off. It seems friendship is a competition as to who does most.

DH also spent 2 days packing up and then setting up friends hi fi system. Only to be told it hasn’t been used in the 3 months since he set it up! This even involved taking up and relaying the carpet for cables. We aren’t just invited round for coffee, there’s always a job lined up. We don’t feel like friends, we feel like cheap labour. So we’ve had to reevaluate what we can do and what friendship looks like. Said friend never lifted a finger for us, ever. We think we’ve been reasonably generous with our time and expertise in the circumstances. We aren’t really sure what this friendship was ever about in many ways as it’s felt lop sided for years. Not all friends cut and run but there are limits.

As I said before, I hadn’t really wanted to go into any details at all, far less drip feed them, but rather look at this situation generally as I’d come across it before and seen it mentioned quite a few times on MN and couldn’t quite fathom it. I shouldn’t have given away anything at all!

(That said, ex-friend absolutely is a bad ’un IMO. This time last year she had 2 months rent covered by ill friend, and a car loaned to her. And as I said above, has been caught telling lies about ill friend and her partner to cover her bad behaviour.
Anyway, enough drip feeding🙊!!

But this is a different issue entirely to other threads! This is just a normal user!

Sorry… do you mean friend is just a user, simple as that? If so, well yes she clearly is, but they’d been very close friends for 10 years until ill friend got diagnosis and then surgery, then crap friend switched off.
It was very much triggered by ill friend’s condition.

Anyway I’ve had lots of perspectives on this and it’s been illuminating. Some of it depressing.
Thanks for all your comments.

It hugely depends on the illness tbh. It might sound awful but I'd say that this could either be an illness or an 'illness'. In the case of the second, I've seen people distance themselves and I can well understand why.

(That said, ex-friend absolutely is a bad ’un IMO. This time last year she had 2 months rent covered by ill friend, and a car loaned to her. And as I said above, has been caught telling lies about ill friend and her partner to cover her bad behaviour.
Anyway, enough drip feeding🙊!!

Then clearly this person isnt a good friend is she? I am not sure why you would use the example of one crappy friend to extrapolate that its a "common phenomenon" for people to abandon unwell friends 🤷‍♀️

If this person is such a shit friend and has a history of lying and not paying money back then it's not about your friend's illness at all is it?- it's about the fact she's a horrible, selfish person and always has been and none of you should ever have relied on her in the first place

It's awful. People do it to spouses and parents too, and it seems to be more accepted now, even justified with the "protect my peace" and "don't set yourself on fire to keep others warm" stuff.
Other reasons are that people are often very busy these days, and some people have phobias about illness. Not saying that's fair, but you asked why, and that's the excuse some use.
If it's workmates you mean, I find things are very different from a decade ago (people were very supportive and sent messages when coworkers were off, now they only send messages to the in-crowd) because the way work is set up in many places now, there isn't as much time/inclination to include everyone.

I do think this is a distinct case, though, it's pretty obvious that the crap friends was, indeed, crap and a user prior to this, so it's not surprising that now the well has run dry and they can't borrow money and the dynamic has changed, they are not being a good friend.

I don't think most people are like this, more very busy and a bit rubbish.

It's pathetic how people drop people. As someone who has been chronically ill and housebound for a very long time I've sadly experienced this a lot. I don't know why it's so hard for people to just send a hey thinking of you text. But people just don't want to know, in general.
I'd never drop someone because they become ill or experience hard times.

@Sarah2891 So how much effort would you put in? The odd text? A chat over coffee or decorate their house? How do you measure friendship?

I’d read about it before quite a lot, hence considering it quite a common occurrence. There are plenty of examples on this thread alone!

It doesn't take great effort to try and keep in touch with a long term friend and see how they are. It's nice to just hear from someone and have a chat on the phone or through text.
Knowing someone is there means a lot especially when you are ill.

My best friend of many years has now become a recluse. I can't go to her home any more because it's obvious how mentally unwell she has become and I can't keep pretending it's normal to live like that.

She has barricaded her house, her dogs are badly trained, totally uncontrolled in constant barking and their aggression to strangers is awful. They are absolutely exhausting to be around for even ten minutes at a time.

Treatment isn't working and tbh, she is at the end of her options for treatment and support as its too complex and entrenched. She's become a conspiracy theorist and it's impossible to talk to her.

I've supported her through more than a decade of this, and I cannot keep it up. It's too much to ask for. She has lots of professional support to call on but she is isolated.

@Sarah2891 our friend cannot respond to any of that. Hasn’t used a phone for years. We do try and keep in touch but are made to feel guilty. We don’t know anyone else who is ill. But this illness is so bad there’s no friendship left.

Yes, but if you read the details there are usually signs of it happening prior to the illness.

It makes absolute sense that if someone is a rubbish, selfish user that they wouldn't stick around in hard times anyway.

In addition, lots of people have given you important context as to why they could no longer stay friends with their unwell friend for very valid, non-dickish reasons. See @GreenFootstool above for just one example.

It's far more complex than just, I got unwell and all my amazing friends abandoned me.

I think this nails it. I cut down contact with someone in such a position because I realised that she was literally sucking the energy out of me with her self pity. Everything was about her illness and instead of using her diagnosis (it took some time to get) as a means to do something positive and look for ways to help her symptoms it was like she used it as an excuse not to do things. I’m an energetic person who’s always out doing things with friends, sitting listening to someone moan all day is not for me!

I'll add that when someone you care about receives a diagnosis of serious illness, which may life changing or terminal, the grieving process starts - grieving who they were, worrying about what they are going to go through, etc. Grief affects people in different ways and someone who was previously the most solid and reliable friend can act in ways that seem out of character.

I am not sure it's helpful to generalise from this situation, which seems to bother you very much. People and relationships can be so complex and so different.

Yes, I think there’s a difference between supporting a friend through illness and being expected to become their therapist or support worker. In my mind, once a friendship crosses that boundary and one person becomes responsible for continually managing the other’s emotions, it becomes vulnerable to fracture.

Of course, people deserve compassion when they’re struggling, and nobody should have to pretend to be positive when they’re genuinely suffering. But friendship needs some degree of reciprocity, even if that looks different during difficult periods. I think there’s a tendency to label anyone who steps back as a bad, awful friend, without considering how emotionally draining the relationship may have become for them.

Being a supportive friend doesn’t mean being responsible for someone else’s emotional wellbeing indefinitely. Thats not realistic or practical for anyone, not when we all have our own family responsibilities/jobs etc

@MonsteraDeliciosaDepends if the friend is recognizable as the person they once were surely? Ill people change and the dynamics change. We know our friend would not have done anything for us and his wife repeatedly talked of moving away. So how much were we valued, until they wanted practical help and pity. Not sure we have the capacity to keep giving in what was already a one sided friendship.

I think that friends might hope the ill person’s family miraculously leap in to help. Sadly they often don’t.

I had this during a very serious illness. Its weird, and hurtful. But I also had people I wasn’t expecting to who really stepped up for me. You learn who your real friends are. Its a valuable life lesson.

Sometimes friends with issues take up a lot of mental space without being able to give much back, and not everyone has capacity to deal with that

I would only add, their time will come what will they do then? Clearly they haven't got the self-awareness to think too much into the future a reckoning awaits