Hello Clive. This, “I am beginning to think that my mental health is made worse by my life situation.” is the most resonating sentiment I've read on here in long long awhile. This is really profound and if you don't mind, I'd like to share some of my experiential insights into that same notion. If you take that realization as fas as it can possibly go, you can potentially change the effect of the illness on your life. I will give you some examples.

Here is an obvious one. When I got out of abusive family life and stayed away from people who were abusers, the drama in my life plummeted. Consequently, my stress levels plummeted also.

Similarly, (and I say this with a certain sensitive care) when I avoided people I knew whom were themselves mentally ill, like severely depressed, manic or rageaholics, the intensity of emotional situations and attending interpersonal drama in my day-to-day life, also plummeted. It was, I say a little self-consciously and selfishly in present company, a huge weight off my back. It lightened the burden in my world and made my life qualitatively better, to stop associating with certain negative people who were in the process of using other people or detonating their own lives or the lives of others (not saying you all are those types of mentally ill folk, just that they do exist and you probably know some like that in your own lives).

I can't overstate that enough. The stress in your life, the urgent phone calls at inopportune times, the police contact, it all just stops when you make concrete boundaries for yourself and create distance between you and those kinds of people. As a young adult, I had enough on my plate dealing with my own issues. I couldn't spare the psychic and emotional energy to deal with other people's.

When I lived in poor urban areas, I was triggered constantly by the locals and the things that they did to each other, day and night. I suffered anxiety, fear for my safety, and sleep deficits, due to hypervigilance. When I moved to a quiet suburban area that abutted a nature preserve, most of that stress burden vanished as well.

When I was a young adult I didn't take care of myself very well. I was toxic from a one to two pack a day nicotine habit. I drank enough caffeine and sugar to sustain the alertness of a battalion of soldiers at the front lines during the winter. It was like my speed. When I quit those things, I noticed at first, that I felt horrible. But after a short while, I felt much, much better. My intake of those substances had slowly ramped up from adolescent use to adult abuse. I didn't realize how much of the various energy spikes and drops, as well anxiety or restlessness was a result of my changing blood levels of all these different combined stimulants, until they were gone from my system. I became a lot healthier without those things and some of the overall noise inside me was gone.

I found that when I worked evenings or graveyards, I slowly built up a sleep deficit which wore on my depression and energy levels as well as my irritation threshold. I tried to deal with it by taking melatonin supplements, but it only helped so much. Only by changing my job to one with a 'normal' daytime work schedule. and making sure I got enough sleep, could I avoid the negative effects of gradually increasing melatonin and sleep deficiencies on my overall state of mind-body health.

Entertainment. How you amuse yourself in your spare time. There must be a million things to get stressed out and bummed out over in our world. You can read politics or world news or finance news and get worked up in some way to those things. Your own thoughts and reactions to what you read effects you emotionally, and if you are in a delicate or unstable place in your life, reading about those things can make you more ill at ease inside yourself.

Likewise, the music you listen to can have a huge effect on you. Now I don't know about the rest of you, but I know that when I was depressed, I tended to listen to extremely moody music. This enhanced my depression. Like music to self-injure by. There is a huge difference in listening to angsty or melancholic tunes, compared to listening to say, the sound of the ocean surf or a summer night filled with cricket and frog song, in terms of how those sounds make your insides feel.

Debt. Lingering debt sucks. Especially if money is hard. The awareness of debt is a frankly taxing thing. It's super stressful. If you can get late utility bills paid up or your rent paid in advance or you pay all your borrowed money from friends, this can take a huge weight of anxiety completely out of your life. It just one less stressor, one less burden, and one more way of stacking the daily stress meter in your favor.

Now then, let's say you do everything in your power to micromanage everything, from your diet and nutrition, to your job, to your neighborhood, to the things you read and listen to, to the company in your life that you keep, even to your credit and debt—over a long enough period of time, stabilizing all these different factors is quite likely going to stabilize you in some way.

If you learn where your stress limits and triggers are, and respect them, and you have a healthy coping mechanism which reliably creates mental and physical peace for you, such as dancing, yoga, or qi gong, or whatever, and you maintain that lifestyle until further notice, your brain and nervous system can, and potentially will be, positively altered, very slowly and subtly.

If you spend time, a long time, practicing something like mindfulness or insight meditation, you can actually see how your own thoughts slowly begin to cause the elements of depression, anxiety or mania inside you. You can sense and feel the emotional and energetic ripples of cause and effect internally. Knowing how you do it and practicing settling yourself and learning to let go of the very thoughts which excite you in some destabilizing way before they get really overwhelming, can over time, teach your being to, essentially, prevent future episodes.

It's really the art and science of mental illness preventative medicine is what it is. Total lifestyle and mind-body awareness. I know of several people, myself included, whom have used this overall strategy and have managed to stay in prolonged remission state where mania and depression sort of forget to show back up.

Month after month goes by as you carefully and delicately disarm all the things externally and internally that can lead you to becoming symptomatic, and a new mind-body balance starts to take over. That is, you were unbalanced and now you are not, or far less so. You slowly become a person who is more often stable than not.

So by meticulous control over your environment and your life situation (assuming you can achieve this, as certainly, depending on where they are in their life, not everyone can), given a long enough period of time, you can potentially, hugely reduce, and even eliminate to a greater or lesser degree, the effects of mental illness on your life, as you slowly get used to not being ill, and that gradually becomes the norm for you, and not the exception.