what's your experience with mental illness in a relationship?

My husband has got a range of issues, primarily anxiety, ADD, depression, and autism that isn't an illness but doesn't help with coping with anxiety or ADD at all. However, he's on the perfect cocktail of meds, exercises, gets out and about, and you wouldn't notice anything except the ADD at all. If he were to have no mess starting tomorrow I doubt he'd be able to function and it would be a disaster, but that doesn't happen. He's careful to take them all and that keeps him in a natural state of being happy and easygoing.

I've got bipolar and anxiety. The bipolar is well-treated though snd at worst I fall into lethargic depression a sometimes, though not any that make me hard to deal with apparently. The anxiety is more difficult for me but it's manageable.

I've been in relationship a where two unhealthy people pulled each other down, but we seem to be the opposite. For whatever reason, we go well together and make it all easier for each other.

However, when he dated mentally ill women in the past, it was never healthy or happy. Even with him doing well, the women didn't want to get help, or couldn't, I don't know, and it always ended up miserable. When I first told him I have bipolar years before we started dating assumed I was probably a nightmare of a person before stepping back and realizing he should wait and see. He's glad he did.

/r/AskMen Thread