Really sorry if anyone finds this insensitive, feel free to tell me honestly if I am completely wrong and need to keep my nose out.
I have a family member who is bipolar, she is very private about her mental health and I believe she has an alcohol addiction although she won’t admit to that. Her daughter has been removed from her care and the family member has had numerous suicide attempts, her life veers between drinking binges and spending weeks alone in her flat without communicating with anyone.
When I speak to her she constantly says there is nothing she can do about her life because she is bipolar. She claims she isn’t getting any help from social services to address the issues that have lead to her child being removed, she says she isn’t getting support with her mental health. No one knows if she has been offered help and refused to take it or if she genuinely isn’t being helped because she is untruthful and evasive about her problems. I appreciate she has every right to privacy and she doesn’t have to tell us anything but it does mean that as a family we are in the dark about her problems and treatment. These problems have been ongoing for years and years with regular hospitalisations and she has been officially diagnosed with bipolar so I know she has had some contact with mental health teams, I’m fairly sure she has turned down help.
I want to support her as much as I can but having no idea about what her problems really are or how she is handling them makes it difficult. When I try and suggest anything she might do to get help or help herself I am told that she has bipolar so there is no point and that there is no professional help available to her. She says wants to get better and get her child back and I am in no doubt that she will die in the near future if she doesn’t manage to get on top of her mental health and drinking so want to help her if I can.
Does anyone have any stories of people who have recovered from similar issues and been able to go on to live a ‘normal’ life and are able to tell me what they did that lead to recovery. I feel that this person would find life a lot easier if they were able to have some structure in their life ie getting up in the morning and going for a walk outside every day but these suggestions are just met by being told that I don’t understand, which is true I don’t really although I have suffered from mental health problems of my own before and I know that these things make a big difference to me.
If there is no point offering her advice like this then what can I do to help her see she needs to accept help and not just wait for everything to magically get better while she hides in her flat drinking.