There’s a particular cruelty that happens when you’re living with mental illness and someone mistreats you. The abuse itself is painful enough, but what follows can be even more disorienting: suddenly, your entirely reasonable reaction to being hurt gets reinterpreted as evidence of your instability. You’re not being mistreated—you’re just being crazy. Again.
This dynamic shows up everywhere. In relationships where a partner cheats or lies, then points to your depression or anxiety as proof that you’re overreacting or imagining things. In workplaces where discrimination or harassment gets dismissed because you’ve disclosed a diagnosis. In families where decades of dysfunction get pinned entirely on the one person who sought help for their mental health.
The mechanism is insidious because it weaponizes the very thing you’ve been brave enough to acknowledge. Admitting you struggle with mental illness requires honesty and self-awareness. It means you’ve looked at yourself clearly enough to recognize when something isn’t right and sought support. But that honesty becomes ammunition in the hands of someone looking to avoid accountability.
When you call out mistreatment, the conversation shifts immediately. Instead of addressing what they did, the focus turns to your perception, your stability, your history. Did you take your medication? Are you in therapy? Maybe you’re having an episode. The actual harm they caused evaporates under scrutiny of your mental state, as if having a diagnosis means you can’t accurately assess when someone is treating you poorly.
This gaslighting cuts deep because it plays on doubts you already carry. When you live with mental illness, you become intimately familiar with the ways your mind can mislead you. You know what it feels like when anxiety distorts reality or depression warps your interpretation of events. So when someone suggests you’re being irrational, part of you wonders if they’re right. Maybe you are overreacting. Maybe this is your illness talking.
But here’s what that doubt obscures: having a mental illness doesn’t revoke your ability to recognize mistreatment. Depression doesn’t make emotional abuse less real. Anxiety doesn’t mean manipulation isn’t happening. Bipolar disorder doesn’t erase the fact that someone betrayed your trust. Your diagnosis doesn’t disqualify your experience of harm.
People who genuinely care about you understand this distinction. They can hold space for both your mental health struggles and your legitimate grievances. They don’t collapse everything into your diagnosis and call it a day. They don’t use your illness as a shield for their behavior or a weapon against your reality.
The ones who do use it this way reveal something important about themselves. They’re showing you that they view your mental illness not as a dimension of who you are that deserves compassion, but as a convenient excuse to avoid examining their own actions. They’re demonstrating that they’re more comfortable pathologizing your response than confronting their own cruelty.
Recovery and healing from mental illness often involve learning to trust yourself again, to believe your perceptions and honor your feelings. That work becomes exponentially harder when the people around you actively undermine it. When every boundary you set or grievance you raise gets filtered through the lens of your diagnosis, you start to lose your footing. You begin censoring yourself, questioning whether you have the right to feel hurt, wondering if you’re really as unreliable a narrator as they suggest.
Breaking free from this pattern requires holding onto a truth that others might try to obscure: you can be mentally ill and still be mistreated. These things coexist. Your diagnosis doesn’t make you immune to abuse, and it certainly doesn’t make abuse acceptable or imaginary. Sometimes people hurt you, and sometimes you’re absolutely right to feel hurt, and your mental illness has nothing to do with it.
The people worth keeping in your life will understand that. They’ll know the difference between supporting you through a difficult mental health moment and exploiting your vulnerability to escape responsibility. They won’t need to invoke your diagnosis every time you’re upset with them. They’ll be able to hear that they hurt you without reaching for your medical history as a rebuttal.
You deserve people who see you as a whole person—someone who sometimes struggles with their mental health and who also has perfectly valid reactions to being treated badly. Someone who might need support and understanding and who also deserves basic respect and accountability from others. These things aren’t mutually exclusive. Anyone who treats them as such isn’t protecting you from your illness. They’re protecting themselves from the consequences of their actions.
