New friend of mine has issues with my close friends and I and how we handle our mental health.
As stated in the title, a new friend join our friend group recently. My close friends and I all have some sort of mental problems, but we're pretty functional, I'd say. However, we all support each other where we can and we've all been able to grow a lot thanks to this. One of the things I struggle with is OCD, and part of that is checking things I really, really shouldn't be checking. So while hanging out on discord, I said to my friends "can you do me a favor and tell me to not do something? I don't want to elaborate, just tell me not to". For whatever reason, I'm able to resist the OCD compulsion by having people tell me not to. My friends passionately told me to stop and thanks to that I was able to resist the urge.
However, our new friend said that it was toxic and unhealthy to do this and that I was "pushing" my mental issues on them. I said that's really disrespectful and not okay to accuse me of that, and said that I was asking for help in a very minor way; that's not pushing. I help my friends with other things too, like do their dishes for them if they're struggling to get anything else done due to that. We help each other, none of us are unnecessarily burdened by it. I genuinely wouldn't be here without my friends and I've been able to achieve so much thanks to their support, and it's the same for them. Our new friend said it's weird and childish and honestly it made me so upset. In her mind, I should be saving the requests for my therapist (not how OCD works) and "leave my mental issues out of my friendship". I asked her if she's ever reached out to her friends for help before and she said only for "normal" things like a breakup. I asked what was truly the harm in it and she said I was "relying" on them for help....To me, that's literally part of the point of having friends? Nobody's saying you have to destroy yourself for your friends, but it's seriously not a big deal to me to be occasionally burdened by cleaning their rooms for them or sitting in the bathroom with them while they shower. It's an honor to take care of my people like that, even if it kind of sucks sometimes. But even then, most the time it doesn't suck at all.
She also expressed that we're all in our 30s and shouldn't "need" support like this, which I found ridiculous. But who knows, maybe I'm wrong.
Am I wrong?
Posted Sep 23, 2026, 8:35 AM UTC