Do you have a good social network, that means personal friends, people you often see or talk to outside of your family?
I ask you that question because I wonder if the mental illness causes loneliness by making it more difficult to make good friends, by making us less good in socializing, by changing our personality, by making us less emotive, etc. I’m personally social and I like to talk to people but I’m unable to get personal friends. I wonder if it’s because of the illness.
I have a brother and also a sister who also take an antipsychotic and they also don’t have friends.
Or maybe it’s the society that makes everybody alone now? I don’t know…
It certainly doesn’t help but there’s a lot of lonely people who don’t have mental illness!
I’m agressively social. Come from a poor but wonderful background full of love etc…but history of mental illness on both sides of the family.
I think being social is a learned skill like many others…it can be improved and you can do it…but being mentally ill can affect your tremendously. It’s hard to be confident with symtpoms …but it’s important to seek out others if you don’t get that from family.
Whew! You sound kind of hostile. Everybody needs friends. If you don’t have a network of friends to talk to and spend all your time alone you get eccentric and hard to talk to. The longer you stay alone the more eccentric you get. I know that from personal experience. Human beings are social animals. We need each other’s company.
I have never had friends in all these years of struggle and I have pulled myself out of living hell. The people around me looked down on me or drew a blind eye. Now I know the only person you can trust to get you out of any challenge is yourself and maybe god.
One thing I’ve heard more than once is that eccentricity isn’t tolerated except among the rich. I imagine a lot of it depends on HOW you’re eccentric. One person’s eccentricity is another person’s profound wisdom.
You can’t go around expecting other people to save you, especially if you’re not working on yourself. But you still need to rub elbows with your fellow human beings. We’re social animals. We need each other’s company.
No warm fuzzy feelings for me for other adults. I have chosen my path. My parents never expressed love for me so I don’t know what that is like. I still have urges for companionship, the antipsychotics have weakened such urges. And with time they slip away.
I don’t have what you call a good social network but I’m never lonely. It’s my choice to be alone and it has nothing to do with the illness
But if you want to make friends but can’t do it due to symptoms then you’re bound to be lonely
Join a day treatment program or any social groups and try to improve your social skills.
But being alone isn’t that bad or is even better than being around people all the time. Maybe you need to learn how to be alone and how to enjoy yourself
Perhaps society has led you to believe you must value friendship. Ever since preschool it has been a running theme. Many really successful people like entrepreneurs have operated solo and partnerless or competitively, so being single has it’s place for sure.
I’m more solitary than I let on. I do have people who support me though. I live at an assisted living center for the mentally ill, so I have people to rub elbows with. Looking back, it was the times when I was the most alone that I got the most out of hand. I probably need more socializing than I’m getting. I keep to myself at the assisted living center where I stay. You don’t have to be buddy-buddy with the people you socialize with. What do we live for but to be put off by and angry at each other?
“Getting out of hand” for many means the extreme of performance, creativity or even genius. Why do creative people isolate themselves during period of productivity. Isolation can be the incubator for great feats of performance. The very extremes of human capability.
True. Isaac Newton subjected himself to total isolation for a while, and then he came out with the theory of gravity, the universal laws of motion, and calculus. I think he was pretty eccentric, though. There are others who have gone into seclusion and then came out with prodigious discoveries.
So what may be considered “well-adjusted” may be an ideal which stops people from reaching their full potential. I must concede. Of course it can help to have people to bounce ideas off of. Competition is another social activity which drives greater productivity. Maybe ongoing social interaction punctuated by briefer periods of isolation is a more balanced approach.