In Elizabeth Barrett’s experience doing social work, she found that many patients with mental illnesses were most interested in knowing how to develop meaningful friendships and healthy intimate relationships.
“Clients would flat-out say, ‘I’m lonely; my life is not what I thought it would be; if I had a companion to do things with… ’” she said.
So in 2008 Barrett co-created a friendship and dating site called TrueAccepance.com for the mentally disabled. It has 1,500 active members to date. On her shoestring social worker budget, she relies foremost on word-of-mouth to attract members.
“I was just reading this article from the National Alliance of Mental Illness linking obesity and depression, and they were saying one of the things that really helped were relationships,” she said. “People who sit at home all day just eat all day; eat when they’re sad; eat when they have nothing to do. If you don’t have anybody to keep you in check, some people eat themselves to oblivion and weigh 400 pounds.”
She said they benefit from having someone to keep tabs on them, plus they have an incentive to look attractive for another person.
When signing up, users can identify themselves as having schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anxiety, depression, personality disorder, Asperger’s syndrome, or they can check “Other” or a combination of any.
Pat Ikeda, who suffers from PTSD, was born on a Japanese relocation camp outside of Kobe, Wyoming in 1945 near the end of World War II. He has been a member of TrueAcceptance for the past two years.
“I believe I was raised in a sort of dysfunctional family,” he said in a soft-spoken voice. He said he had problems in school that went unaddressed, and he didn’t begin speaking English until he was 6. He has been in the mental health system in since he was 5 years old.
“If it wasn’t for some of their help from the system, I probably wouldn’t be here now,” Ikeda said. “It’s not like I’m suicidal or anything, ’cause I have sort of an inborn stopgap to prevent me from committing suicide. But I also have a tendency to worry a lot.”
Six months ago he met somebody who lives in New Jersey through the website and has recently been looking into traveling there to meet her.
“Everything that I’m looking for, she seems to have,” Ikeda said.
“We’re soul mates, it seems like. We have the same likes and the same chemistry. She has certain advantages over me ’cause she still has parents. I’m pretty much alone except for the people who live in the house I’m in right now.”
He also keeps in contact with five TrueAcceptance members regularly and has made “a number of friends.” He said these friends are of great assistance to his sense of stability.
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“A lot of people who come to TrueAcceptance need to talk to others with similar problems — help each other out — rather than just being labeled mentally handicapped,” he said. “We’re just like any other person, except we have some sort of mental health problem that sort of makes us feel separated.”
Barrett said that from personal experience dealing with patients, the people who had no one to reach out to appeared to be doing worse than their partnered counterparts. “Usually symptoms of the illness, like depression, were a lot worse when they had nobody to call or were having a crisis and down in the dumps,” she said.
“People with a couple friends, a lot of them made friends in the clinic and would go out and do social things together. They appeared to be healthier, even physically — less instances of being hospitalized and suicidal. They seemed to be doing better overall.”
