Disclosing and Withholding Mental Illness

The tension sufferers and their families must live with

Photo by Miguel Carraça on Unsplash

After writing my piece about how mental illness affects loved ones, I spoke to my wife and got her thoughts, and she mentioned to me that one aspect I missed is the isolation felt by loved ones who don’t feel comfortable disclosing their loved one’s illness to others. And this got me thinking about a larger theme with living with mental illness in general: the tension between disclosing and withholding. It’s a tension that affects the sufferer and their loved ones.

For the mentally ill, err on one side and your illness becomes your identity, brand, and image, and you are much more likely to fall in love with it. At that point, you have little incentive to recover from your illness because you would be losing a part of yourself! Err on the other side and you are unlikely to get the resources you need to recover because you’ll be too alone. For the loved one, err on one side and you’ll betray your ill loved one’s privacy and there is the potential to turn their suffering into your own self-pity. Err on the other side and you’ll crumble under the despair of loneliness and hopelessness. Both disclosure and withholding are fraught with dangers, especially, as we will discuss, in a digital age. The difficulty is knowing how much about a mental illness to share, with whom, for what purpose, and when. This requires the virtue of prudence.