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

[FlounderTheGuppy]

I’m not sure if I’m being overly sensitive or if this is as upsetting as it feels.

I had a very close friend of 18 years. We grew up together and I genuinely thought she’d always be in my life.

Around 18 months ago I went through a severe mental health crisis and ended up being sectioned. It was the lowest point of my life and something I’m still trying to process.

Instead of supporting me, she completely cut me off. No messages, no checking in, nothing.

What’s hurt even more is that before she disappeared, she said some really harsh things to me – that I was selfish and a bad mum. At a time when I was already struggling so much, that really stuck with me.

Since then, I haven’t heard from her at all.

I keep going over it wondering if I did something wrong, or if there’s something I’m missing, but I also feel really let down. After 18 years of friendship, I never imagined she’d walk away when I was at my lowest.

Part of me thinks maybe she just couldn’t cope with it, but another part of me feels like a real friend wouldn’t have treated me like that.

AIBU to still feel hurt about this and struggle to understand it, or do I need to accept that some friendships just end like this?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

That's also true.

Friends do step up for illness. Mental health has such a stigma. You’re better off without her op.

She wasn’t a friend. Thd same happened to me and I lost nearly all my friends. If if had been. Anger of a stroke of a heart attack that would face been acceptable. Mental health is still seen as weak and selfish.

Those shitty friends fuckinv off made room and time in my life that was no longer occupied by their useless arses.

I tried to support a friend for years with mental health problems and at times she was in crisis.
I had to take a complete step back because in the end, I had huge things happening in my life and had to prioritise my family. My friend really couldn’t see that anyone else could have problems, which I understand because she was ill. I found it very hard to deal with how hard it was for her kids, but whatever I did it didn’t help. She needed a lot of professional help.
A few years later I did get an email apologising, when she was doing some counselling. There’s no bad feeling now and I really appreciated the apology but our lives moved on and we aren’t friends.

Because of the anxiety and distress I would sit and just rock for hours on end in bed or on the sofa, cry, phone GP’s, endless trips to A&E

Would you have known how to deal with a friend in that condition, OP? It's one thing to talk about generally being there for a friend in need, but doing what? Calling to say what? 'How are you?'... and then what to the tears and anxieties about imagined health concerns. A Samaritan has training for this. Health professionals who are supposedly experts often get it wrong too. This level of illness is way beyond what most people can handle and if she got to the point of calling you selfish for it, she was clearly way out of her depth. You can't really have expected her to go with you to A&E on these endless trips, especially as she has her own life/MH to look out for. That isn't meant to sound harsh, just honest as you have to be about what you'd have been able to do for others in strife, which might well be very limited given your own triggers and struggles.

So if the friend has said “I can’t help just now, I’ve broken both my legs, am stuck at home, and I really need help with getting shopping and household tasks done, can you sort this for me?” If the op didn’t step up to this, is op the bad friend?

No but if the friend just cut her off as described in the op she is most definitely better off without her.

So if ops friend cut her off because op doesn’t do what’s being asked, op is better off without her?

I hope your husband and children have been offered therapy.

Not what the op is about.

This has got too much for the friend hasn’t it? Very sad but she’s into self preservation.

I wonder could your friend be feeling traumatised from her experience of this. They might just need some time.

Edit - that's not to say that you'd have to act like nothings changed if she turns up again. Both of your feelings are valid.

No wonder your friends stepped away. They dodged a bullet.

One horrible cliche of any ill health is that you find out who your friends are. For lots of disabled people it is an added grief to their new illness / health situation that the friendship networks they thought they had often disappear or collapse. One positive thing though it shows you who your TRUE friends are.

Hope you are feeling better day by day OP …forget them 💐💐💐, they are a useless friend 🌅