18.5.3  Living a normal life

Due to their illness, people with mental health problems can experience difficulty in daily life activities, such as washing, going to work, building relationships with other people and participating in society at large. Moreover, stigma and discrimination can mean that a person with mental illness feels isolated and excluded from normal community life.

To help a person to recover from mental illness, you can encourage the person and their family to do the following:

• Support the person to do as much for themselves as possible.
• Try to get them to have a daily routine.
• Involve the person in family activities.
• Set small goals to get back to normal functioning, e.g. helping with small household tasks and slowly increasing what they can do.

You can also help to reduce the stigma and discrimination towards mental illness in your community by organising awareness-raising activities. These will be discussed further in the next section.