Impact of friends/family support on mental health

Literature Review

Family and friends have a great role to play in supporting people with mental health issues. Their contribution plays an important role in their recovery and in their response to treatment and set interventions. Friends and family help to reduce the risks of the side effects of mental health problems like suicide. Family and friends provide different forms of support to help those with mental health issues to recover faster. The first form of support which impacts on the health of those with mental health issues is emotional support. According to Harandi et al. (2017), people with mental health issues require emotional support from the people close to them. They need a shoulder to lean on when they are undergoing these psychological challenges. It is the role of the family and friends to offer the emotional support. Huggett et al, (2018) describes people who have mental health issues as people who are most likely to be depressed and stressed up. These people are also likely to feel lonely. The family and friend are there to fill up this gap and ensure that these people have people to share their emotions with all the times. These people should not be left on their own as this will worsen their condition. When they are alone, they tend to think more about the causes of their mental issues and in this case, they increase their issues more, making their lives worse.

There is no one to blame when a person has mental issues. When a person suffers from mental illness, friends and family should always be there for them. The patients should not be discriminated or against. Henry et al (2019) describe the different ways by which people stigmatize those who have mental health issues. These people are left out of important discussions and family meetings. Their contribution to family are not taken seriously and in most instances, they are not even given a chance to express themselves. Most of the friends tend to leave them as they feel that their contribution is no more important. Stigma is a major cause of suicide among people with mental illness (Harandi et al., 2017). This, friends and families have a major role to play in helping those with mental issues in their circles and avoid stigmatizing them.

Friends and relatives should also be there to provide instrumental support which is crucial to those living with mental health issues. Instrumental support involve physical help with physical needs like food. People with mental health challenges may need physical help from the friends and families and they may not be in a position to do all their work on their own (Henry et al, 2019). Families and friends should always be ready to respond to the call of these patients anytime that they call upon them for help. The physical presence of family and friends is critical to the recovery of these people. The patients need to live in a comfortable nature in order to speed up their recovery (Alsubaie et al., 2019).

Informational support is also important for people with mental health and it aids in increasing their recovery rate. Informational support majorly comes from family and friends. Huggett et al (2018) describes the different forms of informational support that the people with mental health challenges require. In the normal lives that people live, friendship is the most important and valuable thing that people have. The social lives that people have impacts on the way they live and how comfortable they are in life. We need to talk to our friends and we want to listen when our friends want to talk to us (Huggett et al, 2018). Friends and family provide an avenue for people with mental health issues to share their worries, sorrows, joys and even show they progress report.

People with mental health issues need people they can confide in. Most of the issues faced by people with mental health problems are confidential. They need people with whom they can share their confidential information with and whom they can trust to keep confidential (Henry et al, 2019). The confidentiality can only be provided by close friends and relatives. If they are not there, then these patients end up suffering more. Sharing information makes it easy to receive help. Informational support includes guidance, advice, information sharing and mentoring (Munikanan et al, 2017). Friends and family offer guidance to the patients when they are facing difficult conditions. People find it easy to talk to friends who are close to them about things which they cannot even talk about with their family members. The contribution of family and friends is thus important as they may serve different roles in speeding up the process of recovery of those suffering from mental problems.

Friends and family act as a compliment to the psychiatrists in treatment of people with mental health issues. Anxiety is common among people with mental health issues. Most of the people with mental health problems need a show of concern to recover faster. Mental health problems commonly arise from excessive thinking with no help which makes people anxious. Friends and family help these patients feel less anxious. Family and friends should be on the forefront to encourage the persons with a mental illness to be involved as much as possible in looking after themselves, and to get out socially and do things in their local community as much as is practical (Huggett et al, 2019). The social support thus stands a great position in fastening the rate of recovery of those with mental health. In most of the instances, people with mental health problems do not like seeing people around them. However, it is more disastrous for them if people move away from them. As a result, they need people around them more than they send them away. Friends and relatives should thus always keep close.

 

 

References

Alsubaie, M. M., Stain, H. J., Webster, L. A., & Wadman, R. (2019). The role of sources of social support on depression and quality of life for university students. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 24(4), 484-496.

Harandi, T. F., Taghinasab, M. M., & Nayeri, T. D. (2017). The correlation of social support with mental health: A meta-analysis. Electronic physician, 9(9), 5212.

Henry, A., Tourbah, A., Camus, G., Deschamps, R., Mailhan, L., Castex, C., ... & Montreuil, M. (2019). Anxiety and depression in patients with multiple sclerosis: The mediating effects of perceived social support. Multiple sclerosis and related disorders, 27, 46-51.

Huggett, C., Birtel, M. D., Awenat, Y. F., Fleming, P., Wilkes, S., Williams, S., & Haddock, G. (2018). A qualitative study: experiences of stigma by people with mental health problems. Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 91(3), 380-397.

Munikanan, T., Midin, M., Daud, T. I. M., Rahim, R. A., Bakar, A. K. A., Jaafar, N. R. N., ... & Baharuddin, N. (2017). Association of social support and quality of life among people with schizophrenia receiving community psychiatric service: a cross-sectional study. Comprehensive psychiatry, 75, 94-102.

Wong, D. F. K. (2008). Differential impacts of stressful life events and social support on the mental health of mainland Chinese immigrant and local youth in Hong Kong: A resilience perspective. British Journal of Social Work, 38(2), 236-252.