The Disaster of Comparing Mental Health Difficulties

Comparing our mental health struggles to others is something many of us have done at some point in our mental health journeys. But this can lead us to feel even worse about ourselves and get us questioning our worth.

The Basics of Comparing

Comparison of mental health can take many forms, it can be based solely on outside appearances, the public face that people put on. Or it may be seeing someone else with the same diagnoses and symptoms as you, yet they appear to be coping better than you. On the other hand, it can be based on someone's Instagram description showing just how many times they have been in a psychiatric hospital. Or, one that personally resonates with me, finding out a person has been through a lot of trauma yet they seem to appear to manage much better than you. But basically, it comes down to either feeling like our difficulties are insignificant to others or that our problems are a lot more severe than someone else.

What is the issue with comparing your mild depression to your friend's bipolar disorder you may ask? It is very easy to slip into a mindset where you think that your problems are not worthy of help, yet regardless of how severe your symptoms are and how much they affect your life, it's very important to acknowledge that everyone deserves help.

Or, on the other hand, if you see your mental health struggles as more severe than others, you could see yourself as an outsider and think that no one can understand what you're going through. This can be very isolating. You need to be aware that although someone with moderate depression may never understand fully what your suicidal depression is like to live with, they can still understand how much depression can affect your life and the sort of symptoms you have to live with.

Comparing yourself to others is a battle you cannot win.

There will always be people who cope better than you and there will always be people who are struggling worse than you. It's something you need to learn to accept.

What I have come to realize is that everyone has had some sort of hardship in life. But every person has a different threshold in dealing with difficult situations and events. Someone who has been abused for a year in the past may cope considerably better with the trauma than someone who was abused as a one-off. That person that was only abused one time may really struggle with overthinking and thoughts of harming themselves whereas the person that was abused for a year may have a higher tolerance and more support with the trauma.

So how do you stop comparing yourself to others?

One of the things that has helped me stop comparing my struggles to other people so much is to acknowledge that everyone is unique with different experiences, influences, support networks, symptoms, and thoughts. And "different" does not need to be synonymous with "more unwell" or "less unwell." It just needs to mean that everyone's circumstances are different, special and justified.

It's also important to be proud of your own and your friends and family member's recovery based accomplishments, no matter how small they are or how far along in yours or their mental health journey they occur. Recognise when you or someone you know has made progress and is becoming more equipped at dealing with mental health difficulties. For more methods to stop comparing, check out this article on Healthy Place.

Now I am not saying that stopping comparison of mental health problems is easy because it's not. But it's not impossible to achieve. Comparing ourselves to others is something deep-rooted in all of our personalities and something we've all done since we were young. However, if you are going through a tough period, your problems are valid and you deserve help however you do not need to have the same experiences as other people to seek help and for others to understand you.

Mental illness is not a competition to see who has it worse or who copes the best.

The only person you should compare yourself to is your past self