Amy’s Story

When my daughter was first diagnosed with clinical depression, my husband and I were traumatized and desperately in need of better coping skills.

I still remember the first skill we learned in our NAMI support group: Recognize the difference between a bad day and a crisis. We had spent weeks living in crisis mode and were exhausted. We left the meeting knowing we had to protect our own mental health and pace ourselves.  We had to learn to say: “We’re not in crisis now,” and let ourselves relax when we could.

Another skill we learned early on was: Don’t turn pain into suffering. It was very easy to become fatalistic and say:  Our daughter will never do anything meaningful with her life.  She’ll never have close relationships.  She’ll never work.  Never have children. NAMI taught us to stay in the here and now and focus on specifics:  What is happening today?  What decisions do we need to make?  What information do we need? We needed to do the best we could with the present, and not ratchet up our fears for the future.

When our daughter was hospitalized for the second time, we learned another coping skill that holds us in good stead today: how to  walk with a person who is in pain. There are so many ways to be with a person who is suffering from a mental illness. We can distract them, listen to them, pass time together, befriend them…  It just takes practice.