What is the Caring Collective and how did we get here?

A while ago, I posted on twitter, asking people to get in touch with me if they had any experiences of caring for a parent with a mental health issue, if like me, they had supported someone through a crisis point (or points), if they too were sometimes worried that they’d been thrust into a life and role they didn’t necessarily want to feel capable of, and if, maybe like me too - they felt they had experiences and moments of understanding and insight they wanted to share.

I was disappointed at first when only a handful of people got in touch. It can be quite vulnerable to say you;re having a problem, look for others who might feel the same, and then not find them. So I was a bit miserable for a while.

Then I realised that maybe if I’d been reading this on someone else’s twitter a year ago, I wouldn't have necessarily got in touch either. 

When I really thought about, I realised there were all sorts of reasons people might not have reached out. Perhaps people didn’t recognise themselves as carers yet, or weren’t ready to say that the fear they felt when their dad had another down day meant they were supporting someone with a mental health problem. 

Perhaps some of you didn’t want to seem like you were attention seeking, and wanted to get on with things in private. Maybe some of you had recently been through this situation, but it had naturally come to an end and you were celebrating a return to normality. Maybe some of you were grieving instead. Maybe some of you didn’t think you had anything you could offer in return for a friendly ear.

So many reasons really, and yet the one that never occurred to me because I know it can’t be true (really, I’ve checked the stats) is that it’s just me and my family experiencing this. That we are the ONLY ones this has happened to. The only family who’s ever had to support an admission to a hospital we were (wrongly) terrified of, the only family who has ever had to rifle through the drawers of a loved one to look for stockpiled tablets. The only child who’s ever had to look into the eyes of one of their parents and ask if they wanted to hurt themselves.

Of course we aren’t. 

At the moment of writing this, we’re at an interesting point in our journey - one that we’ve seen before and so know how precious it is, and that is recovery. But this comes with its own issues and fears - around re-drawing boundaries, about learning to trust each other and the situation again. About letting go a little bit and not being frightened of what might happen next. Of constantly holding ourselves back from hope in case it happens again. Of hoping anyway because, did you know, it’s actually really hard not to let yourself get carried away. Of knowing deep down that it probably will happen again. Of accepting that fact, and all the others we’ve come to learn about each other in the last 3 years. 

And so because I know that, and because we’re at this crossroads where I’m hoping for one thing, but expecting another - and I’ve accumulated a fair bit of knowledge and experience that took so much out of me at the time - I want to have a chance to share it and hopefully, possibly, help someone else in the process. And so became The Caring Collective.

For now it’s just me, with some help from my very talented friends who have helped me set this up and navigate what I really want to do with this space. My plea still remains for people to get in touch, but I also want these pages to act as a safe place too. If you’re overwhelmed, curious, or just feeling lonely with it all - I want people to be able to read this and feel less like it’s just them, and crucially, less like they can’t cope with it. If what I’ve written is useful, please use it. If you want to show it to someone and say ‘ok, this is how it is’, then I would love you to do that. If you want to the pin the tab but read it later because it’s all a bit too much - I see you too.

And if there’s something you’d like to see covered or want to write about (even anonymously) I’m all ears, but in the meantime, I’ll mainly be trying to cover how it feels to do this when your young (ish) and have lots of other things people tell you should be your priority, about how it feels to try and do it from a distance (and whether that can be a good thing) about how to cope or process some of those more difficult conversations, our experience of a mental health treatments and the ‘dreaded’ in-patient wards, and a bit about recovery and how that works too.

I’m not a professional and I don’t have any formal training, so this is really just me, sharing my experiences and some of the ways of coping I’ve found helpful.

I hope it helps.