459387Casual Contributor
Living with someone with serious mental health issues
Hi, I don't really know what I'm looking for here. Maybe some advice from people who have lived through a similar experience?
My parter has been severely unwell for a long time. Looking back there were signs from the start but I didn't recognise them because I don't have any experience with mental illness. When we first met she would say things about people in her life being unkind to her, which I didn't see but took her word for it, or at times just didn't really take in what she was saying because it didn't compute with how I see the world. Once she became pregnant, about 6 years ago, things took a downward spiral and she has since been extremely paranoid and aggressively angry pretty much every day.
Basically, the short story is that she thinks everyone is being horrible and manipulative towards her. This is all "non verbal" stuff that she can't explain and nobody else sees. She also thinks that Mental Health are setting up scenarios in the community to mess with her, manipulate her, and use her as a teaching tool. She also thinks other people and institutions are doing the same thing, such as other parents in the community and the school.
Some days she will send literally hundreds of texts to me, my mum, her mum, and whoever else has tried to support her recently, basically saying "why are you so horrible to me?" in different ways over and over again. She also says vague things that don't make sense to anyone but her, like for example "keep the catholics away from me". I think in the moment she feels that the person she is texting will understand what she means because she thinks they are part of the conspiracy against her. She was also sending these texts to the preschool that our son went to, and posting similar things in the preschool's public forums before she was banned.
5 years ago she was scheduled, diagnosed with psychosis. She was in hospital for a couple of weeks before being released. I probably helped in getting her released because at the time I thought it was best for everyone for mother and child to be together, but now I'm not sure because she has never gotten any better and is as paranoid as ever, but now she trusts Mental Health even less. I actually think she was misdiagnosed with psychosis, as everything I've read trying to understand her condition points to BPD. I understand why they thought it was psychosis though, because a lot of the things she says sound completely psychotic. She is clearly living in another reality from the rest of us.
She's tried a few psychologists, but they haven't helped, and she always ends up thinking they are part of the conspiracy against her. Without knowing what they spoke about, I suspect she wants them to do something about the people being horrible to her, rather than accepting that people are actually being nothing but nice to her, and she is the one who needs help. It's hard for her to accept because it's been going on for so long that it's become a deeply ingrained that everyone in her life has been horrible to her for many years.
This has been going on for so long and I really can't handle it anymore, but I don't know what to do. I've tried speaking to Mental Health many times, but they've basically said all I can do is call 000. The problem is, she can hide her symptoms in that situation, and when she is calm you couldn't possibly imagine her being as aggressive as she gets. So, if the ambos come out to assess her but then leave, I'm stuck with her but in an even worse state than before they came.
I can't leave because I can't trust her on her own with our son for any extended period of time, and don't think the inevitable custody battle would be good for anyone. I can't work full time because she is constantly disrupting my work with her rants. She doesn't work for obvious reasons, so we are not in a good financial situation. To make matters worse, every single day she tells me she wants to have another baby, and when I say we can't have another baby while things are like this she just tells me that I'm the one that needs to change and spends the rest of the day berating me.
This has been going on for years. I don't know what to do. I tried to see a psychologist to help me with my own mental health dealing with the situation, but they basically told me that I need to remove myself from the situation, which I feel is impossible.
So, that's the short of it. Thanks for reading. Does anyone have any advice on how to deal with living with someone who is severely unwell but can't accept that they have a problem?
