Residential living… what does that mean? Well in this case it’s referring to me living in what’s called a residential facility in the mental health world.
It’s a lot like living in a sober house if anyone reading this has any experience. I spend a lot of time in therapy, up to 7 hours a day of it in fact. It’s a little stressful but at the end of the day I return to the group home that I reside in and just kind of live my life while being monitored by people called mental health technicians or “techs” for short. Their proper title varies across the US but that’s the most common.
Currently as of April 2026 I’m living in a residential facility called Mental Health Collective. Life here is a lot like normal but I’m not sure I like it. Again, as of April 2026, I’ve been four months and you know, at a certain point it starts to get tiring. Being constantly monitored and not being allowed in and out of the house as you wish starts to wear on a person after a while. I wish I was able to just leave for a walk or to see my partner but I also understand why I’m not allowed out.
What I will say is nice is that I have a full time care team that I see everyday. I have a personal therapist and a personal psychiatrist who manages my medications. This makes it so that I have a really good care team and a big and strong safety net if anything were to go wrong. You can also meet a lot of good people at a residential. You can make friends that may eventually become friends for life if you decide to keep in contact with them. For example I’ve met someone who’s also going to stay in the area and we are planning to go surfing together and keep talking once we’re out of the residential. This might be a friendship that grows into a very solid foundation that can lead to having support after the residential– one of the biggest problems that people struggle with.
Having support after a hospitalization or residential stay is really hard for a lot of people because you go from a very structured life to being completely “free” to do whatever you want whenever you want. That’s why making friends and building relationships is such an important part of going through mental health treatment. You want to build up a safety net of friends that can help you when things get hard.
And things will get hard. It’s one of the only guarantees in life when you’re mentally ill, things will undoubtedly get hard at some point and you’re going to need friends and people to lean on so you don’t crumble under the pressure.
This is going to be a short blog post for now beause I can’t go into too much detail of my current life cause of privacy laws but this will eventually be edited and I’ll talk more about what my day looked like.