Author: Alex Thompson

When To Stop Helping Someone: 13 Reasons To Step Back

By seeking help through self-care and therapy, you will begin to find yourself again. Mental health is as important as physical health and both your mind and body will thank you.Jeremy Divinity is a blogger, freelance writer, and digital marketer from Los Angeles. He writes for onlinemswprograms.com and publishes on his personal blog which can be found at When it comes to talking with your loved one with a mental health condition, it’s important to listen, express your concerns, and ask them how you can be most helpful. As difficult as it can be, try to practice patience. Remember that a person who resists help is going through a difficult time and will benefit from your continued support.

That biological strategy is called immobilization, and it manifests in the mind and the body with a set of symptoms we call depression. Don’t be ashamed of seeking help on your road to recovery. As recovery is remembering who you are and using your strengths to become all that you were meant to be.

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ACT may be especially helpful if your loved one has not made progress using traditional treatment approaches. When a person enters a conservatorship, they lose the right to make decisions about their finances, treatment, and housing. During a mental health crisis, a person’s safety and well-being are at risk. A mental health crisis requires immediate action to get the person the appropriate help they need to remain safe. When someone refuses to get help, it’s normal to want to stop offering assistance.

Stop Helping Me!

Through encouraging ourselves and others who are suffering from mental illness to speak up, we can create a culture of recovery. Spreading awareness to disseminate false stereotypes to break down mental health stigma. We have these things called thoughts and emotions that have a grip on our well-being. If you’re like me, you have a past or current history of mental health issues. Those issues, or mental illnesses, often occur when those same thoughts and emotions or set off by internal or external triggers.

  1. While also being aware of what helps relieve them.
  2. A continuous ride of twist and turns, ups and down.
  3. They are about whether this body decides there is a threat.
  4. If the person’s symptoms are not stabilized within that time frame, then the psychiatric team can file for an extension, which a judge needs to approve.

Ask questions

In fact, over 12 million adults in the United States seriously thought about suicide in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). So the immobilization response is a key part of the biological defense, but it is ideally designed to be short-term. Either the metabolic shut down preserves the organism, i.e. the rabbit gets away, or the organism dies and the fox eats the rabbit. Learn about opportunities to help change the conversation around mental health. It’s common and natural to want to fix things for our loved ones. Being around them can also be hard when taking care of someone wears you out.

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Her depression was a bad experience that started as the last resort of a good biological system. Depression kept her head down, kept her from resisting, helped her accept the unacceptable. Laura grew up at a time where there was no one to tell, nowhere for her to get help outside her home. In the end, if someone really doesn’t want help, forcing them can be an option… but doesn’t seem to work very well. In many cases, when we force people to do things we want them to do, it only ends in fighting and resentment.

Obligation feels like you have to do it rather than intrinsically having a desire to do it. Therapy fosters help, empowerment, and motivation. For me, therapy helped improve my life, my relationships, and assisted with getting to the root of my problems. You can request that your loved one be taken to the hospital. But once responders arrive, you no longer have control over the situation.

Third, investing time or money in helping gives us social and materialistic benefits (Penner, Dovidio, Piliavin, & Schroeder, 2005). Helping and sharing are perceived as admirable and commendable qualities across cultures, races, and religions. When people who are depressed learn that they are not damaged, but have a good biological system that is trying to help them survive, they begin to see themselves differently. After all, depression is notorious for the feelings of hopelessness and helplessness. But if depression is an active defense strategy, people may recognize they are not quite so helpless as they thought.

More than once his violence had put Laura’s life at risk. When we think of depression as irrational and unnecessary suffering, we stigmatize people and rob them of hope. But when we begin to understand that depression, at least initially, happens for a good reason we lift the shame. People with depression are courageous survivors, not damaged invalids.

Remember, taking care of yourself is not selfish; it is an act of self-preservation that allows you to be of greater assistance to others in the long run. When your boundaries are consistently crossed, it can lead to frustration, resentment, and even a loss of your identity. Being addicted to helping people can be a complex and often overlooked issue. While helping others is commendable, it can harm your well-being when it becomes an addiction.