Self Sabotage: Untreated Mental Illness

I cannot tell you how many clients I have worked with who have serious mental illnesses (i.e. Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder or Major Depression) and sabotage themselves by not maintaining proper treatment. When dealing with serious mental illness such as these, medication is often required to at lessen the symptoms and make life more manageable. Often, people will stabilize on their medications and start functioning fairly well; getting a job, maintaining self care, being able to relate to and interact with others appropriately, paying bills, going to the grocery store, etc. However, some people have a pervasive pattern of stopping their medications once they start to turn their lives around. At this point they “decompensate” (a technical term meaning their symptoms return) and lose everything they had regained. This is fairly natural when people are first diagnosed. Once their symptoms are alleviated they tend to assume, “Ahhh, I’ve been cured!” and often stop taking their meds. However, when they keep repeating the pattern of getting on meds, stabilizing, getting off meds, destabilizing, getting back on meds, and so on I start to wonder if the mental illness is being used to sabotage efforts to live a different kind of life.