Enter the Carers

I have started attending a carers’ group each month: a group specifically for people caring for others with personality disorders.  It turns out that carers mean parents: either people with personality disorders are disproportionately cared for by their parents, or those that make it as far as having partners or friends haven’t got problems. 

Most of the other people in the group have years of experience, and with only five years, I am a novice.  It sounds bleak, but the meetings can be quite funny, even if the humour is dark.  There are not many people you can tell a story that starts with twenty stitches in the arm and an overdose, and end up in tears of laughter.  Not that we laugh throughout the evening – there are many very real confessions of pain, anger and puzzlement – but it is lighter, more humdrum and less grim than you might expect. 

But there is no getting away from the take-home message that, whatever the doctors might believe, there are some people – and some families – living with a terrible toll for decades.  Most of the suffering goes on below the radar of clinics and community teams.  Here are people, some moving into their own retirement, still caring for middle aged children whose lives continue to be utterly chaotic and desperate.  Here are children who, though adult, often cannot hold down a job, live alone or maintain a relationship, and who rack up debts, rely on alcohol and drugs, self-harm and make regular attempts to exit from life.  They and their families are all too familiar to local services: accident and emergency, the police station, the magistrate's court, the social security office, the ward of the mental hospital.

For every family in that room, there are many more families who are not in the room: who have abandoned their children, or who never reach the level of successful caring that attending a carers’ group implies.  Personality disorders are a constant source of pain, misunderstanding and disappointment to families.  Even with diagnosis and information, there are no easy answers to the questions and dilemmas you live with each and every day. How do you carry on loving and supporting someone when their behaviour is destructive?  Amidst the general confusion and chaos, the wash of feelings of anger, guilt and shame, and the incomprehension and intolerance of society, its not surprising families just give up. 

But the people in the carers’ group haven’t given up.  This is their defining characteristic.  They swap tips on treatment, complain about the system, and laugh about the daily absurdities, but they don’t ask “What is the point?”  When they ask that question, I guess they stop going to the carers’ group.