One thing that happens as people grow sicker, be it mental illness or bodily illness, is that, in the real world, a lot of friends pull back...
In a perfect world, yes, we would treat all disease more holistically than we do today... Unfortunately, we don't live in that perfect world...
I had a good friend, Joe Yancy, who died of lung cancer about 10 years ago... Jos knew a lot of people in his community and was liked by most folks who ever knew him... I had moved to the West Virginia mountains and it was a 3 hour drive to see Joe... I was talking with his widow a couple years ago and she told me something very disturbing... She said that as Joe got worst and it was apparent that he didn't have much time left on this Earth that I was about the only person who consistently came to visit him...
I'm afraid that was my experience with my clients... I read their case files which sometimes covered 2 or 3 decades and many of these people had families and friends along the way but when they got sicker these folks dropped out...
Very sad... That's what I mean by the real world...
Janie, bless her heart, is still grinding away in social work and it would be interesting to get her take on this subject...