The Role of Love in Mental Health

The one ingredient on which any recovery from serious mental illness depends is also one which, curiously and grievously, never makes an appearance in any medical handbook or psychiatric diagnostic, namely love. The word is so fatefully associated with romance and sentimentality that we overlook its critical role in helping us to keep faith with life at times of overwhelming psychological confusion and sorrow. Love – whether from a friend, a partner, an offspring, a parent – has an indomitable power to rescue us from mental illness. We might go so far as to say that anyone who has ever suffered from mental illness and who recovers will do so – whether they consciously realise it or not – because of an experience of love. By extension, no one has ever fallen gravely mentally ill without – somewhere along the line – having suffered from a severe deficit of love. Love turns out to be the guiding strand running through the onset of, and recovery from, our worst episodes of mental unwellness.  

Unconditional Approval

What frequently assails and derails us when we are sick in our minds is a continuous punishing sense of how terrible we are. We are lacerated by self-hatred. In such agony, a loving companion can make the difference between suicide and keeping going. Such companions do not try to persuade us of our worth head on and with cold reason; nor do they go in for any showy displays of affection. They demonstrate that we matter to them in a thousand surreptitious yet fundamental ways. They keep showing up.

Non-Judgement

Part of what can make the attentions of others oppressive is the note of patronising pity we detect beneath their apparent kindness. They – the well-ones – have come to see us to help, but we sense how much they cling to a fundamental difference between the mess we are in and who they think they are. We are the insane ones, and they will always fly the flags of health, rationality, and balance. They feel sorry for us from afar, as if we were the proverbial drowning man and they the observer on dry land. Loving companions bear no such hints of superiority. Our companions throw in little sentences that indicate that they too find life very taxing, that they too are a bit mad, that they too might one day be in our place. They do not shed crocodile tears from an impregnable spot, they are down at our level, holding our hand, suffering with and for us.

Loyalty

At the heart of many mental traumas is an early experience of abandonment. Someone, when we desperately needed them, was not present – and their neglect has thrown us off balance ever since. We may find it hard to depend on others in grown up life and lack faith that someone will not run away, or take advantage of us, in turn. A loving companion intuits this about us – and is ready to fight to earn our trust. They know that they cannot blithely assert their loyalty, they will have to prove it, which means not deserting us at moments when others would be tempted to give up.

Reassurance

 The loving companion does their best to quieten the panic, by presenting the future as unknowable in its precise details but fundamentally safe and bearable. The loving companion insists that they will be there to personally ensure that the future will be manageable. When it gets terrible, they can be in each other’s presence and hold each other’s spirits. The loving companion does not get bored of instilling the same fundamental message: I am here for you and it will be ok.

Patience

We are, when mentally ill, often extremely tedious in relation to the number of anxieties we desperately need to go through with others. A loving companion will take the worry as seriously as its progenitor does – and address it head on, without scoffing or denying the scale of the concern. Love gives us the patience to enter imaginatively into the other’s worried mind and to try to settle it by sensible examination of what there might be to fear.

Independence of Mind

A good loving companion looking after a mentally sick friend heals through their power not to care very much about ‘what other people think.’ The good companion knows enough about the perversities of the human mind not to mind in the least when they encounter everyday prejudice and meanness; daftness is to be expected. The hasty judgements of thousands of people will, of course, be askew and lacking proper understanding. Let them laugh, let them be superior, let the idiots be idiots; such are the consoling messages of love that we need to hear when we are defenceless before the judgements of a cruel world. Our loving companion know where their loyalties lie, they are not going to give up on us because a mob is jeering. They are not democrats when it comes to love. They do not care if they are in a minority of one in loving us.

Parental Repair

Both we and our companion may be deep into adulthood, but if their tenderness heals us, it is likely to be because – in covert ways – what they are doing through their ministration is repairing a deficit of early love. They will be reparenting our broken child selves. It is one of the eternally paradoxical things about babies and small children that they need love as much as they need milk and warmth to develop properly. They need to be cuddled, spoken, and sung to, played with, held close and looked at with enthusiasm – and will as good as die inside without such care. Every child needs to experience a basic feeling that they are limitlessly wanted by those who put them on the earth and can generate intense pleasure through their very being. Without this, a child might survive, but it can never thrive. Their right to walk the earth will always be somewhat in doubt, they will grow up with a sense of being superfluous, disruptive and, at core, unappealing and shameful. It could seem highly patronising to tell an adult that they need above all to be reparented. It is in fact the height of maturity to recognise that the small version of us must – if we are ever to get better – allow ourselves another chance to experience what it could feel like to matter limitlessly to a kindly and thoughtful companion.

The Night 

Way back, the night was the time when we were especially afraid, and especially needed love and reassurance. The night will terrify us, stretching out as a vast and threatening space in which our worst fears and most critical voices will have unlimited dominion. We need someone who can help us during these tortuous hours. We will know we are properly loved when we can wake up at 3.30am and have the right no longer to be completely alone with our racing hearts and fearsome anxieties.

We should not be so surprised at the enormous levels of mental illness at large in society; we need only get clear how bad we collectively are at love, how poor we are lending sympathy, at listening, at offering reassurance, at feeling compassion and at forgiving – and conversely how good we are at hating, and shaming and neglecting. We consider ourselves civilised but display levels of love that would shock a primitive tribe or a den of thieves. Furthermore, we’ve opted to wash our hands of the issue and handed responsibility for it wholesale to the scientists, as though they could culture a complete solution to mental illness through their pills. We ignore that the cure largely lies in the emotional realm: in getting better at appeasing each other’s fears, at being generous about our transgressions, at no longer tormenting and maltreating one another for our failures and at sitting together through the darkness of night in a spirit of infinite care and kindly forbearance.