Gum on My Shoe

In this post my aim is to explore how sympathy, empathy, and compassion relate to one another. I began with a quick search through the book Fran and I wrote about our friendship. I was surprised to discover the word sympathy doesn’t appear even once in the book’s 259 pages. Sympathetic occurs three times. Empathy twice. Compassion / compassionate appears thirteen times. It’s clear which feels most relevant to us, but that didn’t help me define or differentiate between them. I looked online next. Two definitions caught my attention. The first is from an article by Sara Schairer. While these words are close cousins, they are not synonymous with one another. Sympathy means you can understand what the person is feeling. Empathy means that you feel what a person is feeling. Compassion is the willingness to relieve the suffering of another. The second is from a post by Olivia Guy-Evans. Simply put, sympathy is feeling for someone, while empathy is feeling with someone. The idea ...

What if you were there already and didn’t realise because there was no big red YOU ARE HERE arrow on the map; no neon sign or text alert saying “This is it. You’ve reached that place the others were talking about.” There should be a kiosk selling BEEN THERE T-shirts or badges. Then you’d know. And others would know too. They say if you’ve never experienced something for yourself, you can’t understand what it’s like. I get the point, but it’s not precise enough for me. How similar must my experience be to yours, for me to understand what you’ve been through? Exactly the same? Somewhat similar? Who gets to decide? This is not a trivial question. Depending on the circumstance, it can affect friendships and other relationships. In the health sphere, it can affect access to services, care, and support. Peer support in particular is predicated on the concept of shared experience: Peer support brings together people with shared experiences, and these experiences can vary. For example...

This year’s Time to Talk Day is Thursday February 6, 2020. I wrote recently about feeling flat which is something that happens from time to time. Many of my friends live with significant mental health issues and it would be easy for them to dismiss my accounts of when I am feeling low. It is a testament to them and the nature of our friendships that I feel safe sharing how I feel no matter how mild that might be compared to what are often dealing with. My friend Aimee Wilson blogs at I’m NOT Disordered about her lived experience with serious mental health issues including borderline personality disorder, self-harm, and suicidality. My moods, issues, and problems are mostly trivial in comparison to hers but Aimee has always treated me with respect and empathy. The following exchange is a great example of this. It meant a lot that she did not assume I was okay but checked to be sure. Martin: Hiya. I’m making some notes towards answering the questions at the end of your tra...

I’m going to talk about a few things said to me over the years by people who have what I do not: lived experience of mental illness. They’ve been hard to hear but I’m grateful because I’ve learned something valuable each time. “You don’t understand” They say we all have mental health but as Fran and I describe in our book High Tide, Low Tide: The Caring Friend’s Guide to Bipolar Disorder there’s a fundamental difference in experience between someone like Fran who lives with mental illness and someone like me who never has. Well or ill, we are all people. Nevertheless, it is naive, disrespectful, and dangerous to downplay the impact illness has on those affected by it. Those who are ill […] have particular life experiences, perceptions, expectations, and needs. To use Fran’s terminology, she is the ill one in our relationship; I am the well one. Nothing more or less is implied by our use of these terms. High Tide, Low Tide , Introduction So when someone tells me I don’t un...

By Sarah Fader Everyone has their own darkness Mine is outside of my skin at times Creeping slowly around the confines of my mouth not allowing me to speak only telling me to feel what I don’t want to feel. You see my dark and also the light even when it’s hard to find even when it’s invisible to everyone around me. That is your power That is your gift You sit quietly Listening as she talks she cries she needs you and you’re not afraid in fact you embrace the raw feelings. I’m relieved to know that there are people like you in the world Thank you for loving without question and embracing us without fear. Don’t change who you are Ever And Keep listening It matters. &nbsp Sarah Fader is the CEO and Founder of Stigma Fighters , a non-profit organization that encourages individuals with mental illness to share their personal stories. Like six million other Americans, Sarah lives with panic disorder. Through Stigma Fighters, she hopes to change the ...

By Roiben We all hope in today’s society with its constant rush and pressure that people can still be good, helpful and polite. That we would, upon seeing a person in need, stop like the much-fabled good Samaritan, and help. That we would hold doors open, offer to carry heavy bags and help an older person across the road. However, there is such thing as being a little over-eager to help and perhaps misguided in how to go about it. I have recently begun using a long cane. Michael Cane, my new and trusty friend, is helping me get about my daily life. I had been warned that using the cane does have its drawbacks, in attracting overly helpful people. It was still a shock to the system when it happened. I was walking a well-known route from an underground station to work. This involves crossing a few roads. I stopped at the traffic lights to the first road and prepared to wait for the lights to change. Out of nowhere a man grabbed my right arm (the arm holding the cane). He had said...

By Roiben Trigger Warning : Before reading this post, take a moment to consider its contents: it discusses Suicide and Mental Illness. If reading about Suicide is likely to make you feel worse, or trigger any urges to cause yourself harm, I ask that you simply look away from this post until a time when you feel more able to handle it. Depression (and Mental Illness as a whole) is a thief and a murderer. It steals everything, little by little. Your self-worth, your enjoyment of your hobbies, your energy and motivation and then, at its worse, it can steal the will to live. The very spark of life goes out and existing becomes harder and harder to justify. Your mind screams at you to end it now! To stop the suffering. Before you know it, you are planning your very demise. The end of you. You obsess over the many methods, whether “accidents” like getting run over by a car or train. Or the more planned occurrences: The overdose, the cuts, the alcohol, the ligature. All call to you, t...

Fran and I live on opposite sides of the Atlantic. We use technology. A lot. Without it, we couldn’t do our friendship at all. Indeed, we would never have met. Fran has a Windows laptop and an iPhone. I have a Samsung Android phone, a PC, and a Chromebook. I like Googledrive for sharing documents and cloud storage. Fran prefers Onedrive and her iCloud. Connecting might be simpler if we agreed to use the same technologies and platforms but we get by, and learn a lot in the process. One way or another technology is an integral part of our everyday lives, whether at work or at home, or out and about in the world. Computers. Phones. Cameras. TV. WiFi. Internet banking. Shopping. Entertainment. We have some basic (and probably incorrect) ideas about how it all hangs together. We want it to work most of the time and grumble when it doesn’t, but we accept there are going to be difficulties and do our best to work around them. When problems and complications arise, we don’t think worse...

By Tricia I believe there are a great many expectations that we put on our children during the holidays. We expect them to help decorate the tree with the family, go shopping with us, maybe wrap presents, and the worst part of all is having to spend time with extended family, oftentimes crammed into too tight of quarters. And we expect all of this to be done with a smile on their face. They must be polite to Aunt Rita and Uncle Joe who are always making jokes at their expense. They have to accept hugs and “Merry Christmas!” from people they only see once a year, again all with a smile. Maybe we could let them off the hook at least a little this year? If you have never suffered from any sort of mental illness, you likely do not realize the extra stress that this puts on those who do. Most kids enjoy decorating the Christmas tree, but if your child doesn’t want to this year, why would you want to force him? Nobody enjoys being made to do things, but kids who suffer from bipol...