I believe my partner suffers from mental illness. I'm not a health professional, and am not qualified to say that definitively, but I am around them every day, and live with their symptoms.

I've long mused on this idea and what our options are, how I might bring it up with her, what I might do to help, and importantly how to broach the subject of potentially getting help.

What I've not really focused on before and hadn't thought of was what things I might already be doing very wrong. My amateur diagnosis is that she suffers from OCD or something like it, but what I only just realised is that there's a certain aspect of my attitude towards this that I hold privately that is almost certainly leaking out to be not so private. That is, a general impatience for it, and an irritation that this problem is 'allowed' to take over our lives as it does. I only realised my wrongdoing on this recently because I suddenly recognised how familiar my attitude is to that of my father towards me when I previously suffered a serious bout of depression for a 2-3 year period. I also see the similarities in how he clearly tried to find the right way to deal with this, but failed nonetheless. 

I'm starting to recognise that I'm allowing my intense desire for her to 'just snap out of it' to come through and I was just reading how, much like depression, the symptoms of OCD are worsened when confronted with criticism for it. In hindsight that seems obvious, but it somehow never occurred to me because the problems the OCD causes make me so angry that it becomes much harder to find sufficient empathy not to feel like she does it on purpose.

This has me seeing see in myself a hypocrisy I'd rather never have noticed. The thing is, I would have thought experiencing a mental illness, and coming out the other side would help at least slightly in finding appropriate ways to deal with someone else who is similarly afflicted, but it would seem not. I fall in to all the same traps and blinkered ideas that others had when confronted with my problem. 

It now leaves me appreciating what it's like for those around you when you have a mental illness and how frustrating it is. I may appreciate logically how it helps no one to be critical and how accommodations should be made to help lessen the stress the OCD causes but it's so hard because it *does* need to be brought up, the situations we find ourselves in because of it *are* ridiculous and as much as I realise how unrealistic it is I really, really *do* want her to 'just snap out of it'; probably just as much as others wanted me to 'just get over' my depression. After 5 years of this I can observe the trajectory of the illness and it's definitely getting worse and while my adaptive ability is increasing to meet each absurd new level, the quality of life is getting much worse and I'm getting tired. 

How do you find the strength not to make something like this worse and the patience to deal with the fact that it might never end?