To not understand why "friends" are abandoning a friend in need?

[runnermum1974]

My friend attempted suicide and did real serious damage to themselves.

Days after the attempt 3 of their close friends have said they are going their separate ways. They have given some reasons, but they are pretty lame - like they are not compatible, and deciding that now, after 5 years of friendship!!

I am not saying that they have to be friends or anything. But the timing is bloody awful.

I do not understand how friends can abandon a friend in need. Anyone can be a friend in the good times. The test of friendship comes in the hard times.

If anyone has a story about abandoning friendships when a friend is in a difficult place, then I will appreciate the insight.

AIBU to think it is unkind to leave a friend in need?

Wow, that's nasty. Weird way of doing it

It sounds unreasonable when you read the OP but we don't know the full story and how much the suicidal person was putting on them or how they were acting. At the end of the day they are her friends not counselors who are qualified to help a suicidal person get better.

but that professional care is not available because of the NHS cuts etc - then what? Just leave them to rot and die? You sound like lovely people.

And if your friend needed heart surgery would you pop her on the kitchen table and hack her open with a carving knife?

Cogito's point is that she needs the help of a professional and not an interested amateur. If dropping her at the door of A&E forces the issue and gets her access to that professional help, then that is the right thing to do.

As it happens, I've seen Cogito reach out and help people with well thought out, sensible advice. She is, from what I've seen, a lovely person. She's just not naive about mental health problems.

Friends become friends for various reasons. Usually all light hearted ones. Most friends can cope with usual levels of change. Some changes like MH push friendships to places that no party ever wishes to go.

Purely my opinion but I don't believe this makes friends that stay better than friends that go. It's personal tolerance levels of bigger stuff. That's why sometimes the ones who stay can be surprising ones, recent ones. And ones that can't are older.

I think it's sad all round. Don't assume that walking away was easy. It isn't necessarily. You cannot talk for others actions. Just your own. If you can be around, great, good on you. Doesn't make you better friends though or a better person. It's just different people.

If the person with mental health issues needs professional care - but that professional care is not available because of the NHS cuts etc - then what? Just leave them to rot and die? You sound like lovely people.

Not one person on this thread suggested you leave people to rot and die the language you use is quite emotive and dramatic it reads like you are the only person is the world this woman has you are not a HCP you are not a mental health nurse you are an ordinary woman who has a friend with mh problems you can't fix her all the support in the world will not help her if she decides to do it again and if she does die you will feel guilty you didnt do enough, she needs support and medical care you can only be her mate if you want to help her find local professional support MIND run mental health groups and support find it direct her to it and be your friend, these other friends have stepped back for their own reasons, tbh i don't blame them

OP - you haven't answered - these other friends, do they have DCs, DPs and full time jobs? do they have other things that are (quite rightly) more important to them than your friend with MH problems? Because if you are talking about through the night calls, having to be there for her, that's energy and time they are taking away from their family and careers. If they can do both, great, but the suicide might well have just pointed out to them how much your friend needs and they just aren't able to do it.

Better to be honest and focus on their own families, than like Burren's mother, just put the friend first at the cost to everything else.

Also in my experience of the NHS (although I know this isn't universal) if care of any sort is available from the community, it's not forthcoming from the NHS/SS. By 'being there for her' your friends maywell have ruled out her chances of getting professional help.

How awful to gang up together (always easier to do nasty things to someone else if you're in a gang) and get you to deliver a letter. They didn't even have the courage to talk to her. What did the letter say, do you know? Did they give their reasons?
A lot of people just seem to be saying that if you're the kind of person who doesn't like helping others then that's fine. No-one has suggested that they sacrifice their families for a friend - most people have some time in their lives that they can spend on someone other than their families. Insisting that your whole life has to be spent on family activities and on fun to be with friends, with anyone who has a problem being dumped, is very selfish. It's a well known phenomenon that people down on their luck get dumped - this can apply to losing one's money and/or social status as well as to having mental health problems.

This is partly why I try never to share my own depressive/anxious issues with anyone either on here or IRL.

Because I would be asking for more than I can give in return.

I think unless you have a very special friendship with someone, that really does work both ways on that level and to that depth, you cannot really expect people to take on these huge, huge problems.

I don't mean to say it is the sufferer's fault. It's just that it goes above and beyond normal friendship, and that is asking an awful lot of most people.

I go to my own family if I am suffering and need reassurance or someone to see me through a tough day or something. Suicide stuff I have always kept to myself.

I don't see it as my other friends' problem.

You can't fix her, you are not trained in mental health. You won't know the times when your input will be enabling her or harming her by lending credence to a delusion.
Have the words treating them would be a bottomless pit been heard from you directly from a senior health professionals mouth?

Is what they meant actually they haven't the money to deal? Or more a reflection on the possibility that at this point your friend is being her own worst enemy as she currently doesn't want to face her issues and has no interest in getting well at this time?

Does your friend hoard animals? Animals are in no position to be an emotional crutch for someone, they need love and care themselves. Where the mental health professionals seeing she had too many balls in the air with them and was beginning to neglect their primary needs for care?

While animals can be towers of strength for their owners emotionally, they are not a substitute for something that is seriously lacking in their own mental stability. It is unfair to ask them to fill such a hole and like you say when it all falls apart they may well ultimately answer for it with their lives. The real question here should not actually be are they your friends life line and do they keep her going and are her only reason for living? More is she providing them the care and support they need, even animals can't be all give, they need love in return as well.

This is a complex situation OP and you can't use a love will conquer all attitude as a band aid and say it will be ok, it won't. I am not saying don't help her but you need a hell of a lot more information about what help you need to be offering her and what may initially be seen by you as help but which may actually make your friends situation worse.

Refusing to see the finer complexities and seeing that for some people they have to walk away as the illness is selfish and will demand they sacrifice everything they have to your friends needs and just saying they didn't have enough love or weren't very nice is not seeing the bigger picture.

Giving yourself over to your friends every whim is not being there. Doing whatever she asks is not being there and not being constructive. If you really care and want to do something you need to approach the mental health professionals and find out exactly what her needs are, then be her advocate and harass and harangue the health authority to ensure she gets that help. They will always help those who shout loudest over those unable to speak for themselves unfortunately. Being her shield against the world and knight in shining armour will not do her any favours and will exhaust you to a point where you cannot physically function. What will she do then when you have fallen apart yourself?
Just throwing your hands in the air and saying they won't help is going to land more on your shoulders, you are not Atlas. They have to be pushed to help and you have to recognise that the help your friend needs and the help she wants may be two very different things.

Don't delude yourself that you can do it alone this will be very harmful to your friend in the long run. Educate yourself about her illness and be one of her ports of call for aid, not the only port of call. Its not called a support network for nothing as we all have off days and she needs people to be there and one single person no matter how much they want to can be there 100% of the time. You will have emergencies in your own life which coincide with hers, her need will not wait and she will not understand this so you do need other agencies and people involved to take over. If she demands you to be her only support, compelling though she may be and no matter how much you want to do it you do not have the strength, no one person ever can. No matter how nice, saintly, loving, religious, compassionate or whatever else may be driving it.

runnermum1974 There is a lot to be said for 'treat others as you would want to be treated yourself

Would you like your "friends" to be slagging you off on mumsnet? Like everyone has said time and time again, they could their own private reasons why they are not able to support the suicidal person

Put your energy into helping your friend, why do you insist on criticising them again and again?

I don't think you are giving the full story here, quite a bit of exaggeration

Sorry to nit-pick, but you said you'd all been friends since uni and were 40, but then that you'd been friends for five years. It's a bit confusing.

I am not sure if this makes a difference but to some extent, if you are old friends who don't see each other much, it is quite cruel to gang up like this and send a letter. I would have a lot more time for someone if they just set their own boundaries and kept out of it. Was this friend involving them a lot? I don't like this gang mentality, especially when the friend is very vulnerable.

Having said that, I think sometimes for your own sanity and life you do have to distance yourself from people. I'm one for sticking around with friends and have a couple of friends with long-term depression, but helping someone in the middle of a MH crisis can be both stressful and scary and your sense of responsibility skewed- you start to think you can stop them killing themselves (or it is your responsibility to do so).

On MN there's a phrase that comes up on dodgy threads that says something like 'don't offer more than you can afford to give' and I think this applies to friendships.

Yes, that glaring inconsistency in the storyline is worrying. The OP shouldn't change the facts in order to improve her argument.

Depends how old they were at university.

Sillylass I agree with you, it's not an either or situation. I have a friend with long-term depression and when she starts to get low, I encourage her to get professional help, go back to counselling, think about AD's but continue to be friends. It is a little different though if someone is having a very serious MH crisis in which they may be paranoid and delusional and/or at risk of self-harm or even harm others. In that situation, your own safety and sanity is paramount and it's unlikely that your friendship alone will be enough- indeed as another poster has said, helping your friend get the help from services she needs is probably the best thing you can do.

Sillylass79 I didn't say that professional help would be superior but that she needed more information from them rather than to just lead from her heart. It could be they could be doing more and are dragging their heels. There could also be points at which she could help but needs more information on what actions actually would be help and what may harm. A great deal of harm can be done by people who have good intentions but don't understand the other persons needs.
I was trying to dissuade the OP from going it alone which she seems determined to do in her anger at the injustice of her friends treatment by others.

runnermum1974 Tue 11-Mar-14 07:27:13
"If the person with mental health issues needs professional care - but that professional care is not available because of the NHS cuts etc - then what? Just leave them to rot and die? You sound like lovely people.

So, if/when you or someone close to you gets seriously ill, you will totally understand people close to you running away and not looking back? Seriously doubt it. "

Did you read Burren's and TwinTwin's posts? Would you want to be the child whose needs were never met because of your mother's overwhelming need to be the good friend to other people?

When dd was ill I had very little social life of any kind- I was needed for her and everything else pretty well had to take second place. That would have included any friends I had made at uni, it would have included my own parents and brothers, because my strength was absolutely taken up and if I had tried to spread myself more thinly I would not have been of help to anyone.

OP...Your talkning shit about the true love thing and frankly romatising your wonderfullness

Come back when you've seen the 3/4/5/6 friend/relative through actual suicide and you have yet another person in you life wanting help that you feel you can no longer give, and take the decision to walk away.

Then wax lyrical about true fucking love

Miaow. I hope you get some solace soon xxx ( I feel for you, as I'm sure we all do)

Perhaps we need the both: professional care and friend care/love. I know I do! Perhaps a friend's light hand is more appropriate eg as a pp said, keeping in touch, sending cards now and then etc. A blunt cessation of a relationship is hard to bear at the best of times (and a slow withdrawal just torture imo), it is necessary when you can keep in general touch? if there's an early hours desperate call, perhaps generally commiserate but refer to an org like the Samaritans, keeping the areas of speciality firmly boundaried.

*is it necessary, not it is necessary

In order to support someone going through a tough time, you need excellent boundaries and the ability to enforce them.

Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. Many people make the mistake of swooping in with some noble intention of making everything ok, rescuing the other person. IME you are most helpful when you support someone to take control of his or her life themselves rather than doing it for them, but the helpers among us rarely realise that until they've overburdened themselves with someone else's problems. Meanwhile the person suffering the affliction of depression or whatever has become even more infantilised, helpless and needy.

Someone who has a long-term MH problem, or someone whose life is constantly lurching from one crisis to the next, can wreak havoc with the lives of those supporting them unless that person is able to maintain boundaries around their own life and the level of help they are willing to give. As an example, that may mean not answering calls after 10pm unless it's a real emergency. If you have someone who just won't respect that boundary and who will even go so far as to turn up to your house at 2am in the morning if you've dared switch your phone off, that's a problem. Few people would mind that happening in a real emergency or emotional crisis, but when it begins to happen regularly, your life is no longer your own. That can result in your own life and relationships suffering.

I haven't walked away from any of my friends who have experienced problems. But I have learned (the hard way) about the necessity of protecting yourself and your own life in order to be able to provide any level of support that is useful.

I'm sorry your friend has felt so low that suicide was seen as the only way out and I hope he or she feels better soon.

I agree with Burren and also Dahlen. Unconditional support may not be helpful to the person who is ill. Knowing that you will stay whatever happens and whatever your friend does is a comfort but also a kind of licence- not to improve, not to try, not to exercise self-restraint.

All that said, writing a joint letter to cut the friend off was a pretty awful act, unless there is some significant context we are not aware of.