The trouble is the imbalance in the help and support provided with few people getting enough, but the acute and young doing better out of the system than the chronic and middle aged.
It helps if you have family fighting your corner. At least in my case that’s meant I now get the care support I should always have had in Essex. Do mental health services themselves do much ?-no .
My main problems are on the social front I get 3 hours a week care. Any more and I’d have to pay even though,like a lot of people with severe mental illness,social problems are an integral part of my condition and should reasonably be treated through the NHS. Be it due to mental illness or asd/dyspraxia/nvld or a combination of all.
I’m lucky in that I have caring family but what if you don’t have family near at hand to argue your case? That was the situation for me when living in Essex. There was a psychiatrist saying I had “Limited ability to live independently in the community” but I was very much left to my own devices.
Now at least I have a care plan that says the help,minimal though it is, is to allow me to continue living independently.
The trouble though with prolonged lack of help and support is that you reach a point where chances of living a totally normal life are extinguished. It becomes a case of maintaining the limited level you’re at and not slipping even further back.
It’s a case of maintaining 7-10 out of 20 rather than reaching 14-20 of your functioning potential.
I don’t know what you mean by help and support
like basic needs sort of thing, housework, shopping, cooking, money, etc.
my mom used to help me with bills, that’s my main problem,
but now I do almost all of them online, so it’s just one click and I’m done.
I just hate snail mail, and I can’t keep up with it. I ask Phil to help me,
all he’ll do is recycle a lot of it.
Your’e so smart, and you appear independent minded to me.
That’s half the problem . I’m verbally smart which in a 2D environment such as here carries a lot of weight.
The truth though is that I struggle with practical intelligence/practical tasks(some of the things you mentioned). This of course has never been fully recognised by the psychiatric system as even mental health professionals jump to the erroneous conclusion that to be good verbally is automatically to be good non-verbally .
Then there are the social interaction issues. I think, in that they say I have very poor social skills, they recognise that to some extent. However there’s been little help with that aspect of things and no recognition these might involve co-morbid problems like asd/dyspraxia/nvld as much or more than mental illness.
I come across as far more functional in this highly verbal environment than I am in real life. Without the support I get I’d struggle to cope with day to day living. I guess in the grand scheme of things that does make me better of than those who couldn’t live independently even with a lot of support. It’s all relative though.
I don’t think the disjoint between how someone comes across on a forum such as this and how they may function when it comes to day to day life is solely relevant to me.
There are no doubt others who come across here as doing very well because of their verbal skills when the truth is they too may have ongoing difficulties .