Wife with mental illness

LegacyUser

Hi there,
I'm just looking for a bit of advice. Quick summary: I have been with my wife for 12 years, and she was diagnosed with a mental illness last year. She is on medication and is very diligent with that, however, she has had multiple relapses over the past year. We have had to deal with a lot of stuff: her infidelities and lies, my anger with her, etc but we are in a better place now and my priority is her health (whilst not neglecting my own). She is back in hospital again at the moment (she started having delusions, and headed straight to the hospital to check herself in, so fair play to her for that) and it's seems reasonably clear to me now that she is suffering from severe post traumatic stress disorder or something similar. She is a very sensitive girl, and has had a very dysfunctional family life (mental illness, alcoholism), she bottled up all her emotions from an early age because her parents were so self-involved they didn't/couldn't do anything to help her, she went looking for help in the outer world and got herself into very bad situations from an early age that have really damaged her. I won't say she had affairs with people during our marriage, more like she slept with 3 guys and struggled to get rid of them (and pursued another by e-mail) - but these happened many years ago (the worst things happening when we had temporarily broken up for 6 months) and she didn't tell me until last year because she couldn't believe that she had done such things. Don't get me wrong - I am no sap, and I dragged her over the coals repeatedly about these things until I got to where I am now, which is understanding that her illness got her into lots of bad situations and she lacked the assertiveness to get out of them. I thought of walking away lots of times, but I know that we have a special relationship and it's just a matter of getting a handle on her illness and dealing with her past. I love her more than I have ever loved anyone, and would do anything for her within reason - I would even leave her if I thought that it would be best for her recovery, but she loves me too, and says that I am the only good thing to have happened to her in her life and she doesn't want me to go. That's is where we are at now.

She is back in hospital again, and I am being level headed about it all now, as our dramatic conversations are long over. I know she is traumatised by the fact that she had sex with other guys when she was psychotic/manic but I can't help her through that because it's too much for me. The doctors had been trying different combinations of medication and she is on a waiting list for a psychologist, but to me it seems like she needs regular CBT to deal with trauma, but it's a bit hard because reliving traumas seems to bring the psychosis on. It's kind of a catch-22 situation. She has suppressed so much since she was a child that when she did finally open up last year it's been coming out non stop. I am a little scared that something like rape or sexual abuse with come up at some stage, and that it might be too much for her to deal with. I don't want to lose her. I am giving her space right now - i just popped in to the hospital to give her some clothes and stuff, and we hugged and I told her I love her and if she wants anything call me. I gave her a lot of emotional support over the years but I think she is now realising that she has to answer her own questions and deal with certain things alone. I pray that she has the strength to do so. I am doing as much as I can in my own personal life as worrying doesn't really do anything, however I am trying to think of ways to improve the situation. We live in dublin and I really think we should move down the country as there are too many reminders here for us both and also the pace of life is a bit fast while she is recovering/adjusting. But I am frightened that she will lose the excellent medical services she gets here, or that she will get bored and depressed living down the country. I am the type who will make the best of a situation - if we do have to live down the country we both love nature and will be outdoors as much as possible, renting a nice big house with pets (something we haven't been able to do in Dublin because of high rents) but visiting cities fairly often. I am very excited about the life we could potentially have together, but I'm struggling make decisions these days because of her illness. Maybe I just need to sit tight and be patient.

I'm just venting a bit here but if anyone could offer some advice with regards to treatment or life advice, it would be much appreciated.

strobe

Hey man, I really don't have any worthwhile advice I can offer unfortunately. Just felt the need to wish yourself and your wife luck in dealing with the situation. Be sure to look after your own mental health in terms of talking things through with friends/family or a counsellor yourself. Sounds like a really tough situation to be in and you'll need support yourself to get through it and be able to support your wife. Maybe you could contact mentalhealthireland.ie or similar organisations to seek their advice and support?

Whispered

Op your wife is very lucky to have someone like you in her life.

I don't understand the level of her illness so could be way off here, but it seems as if you've taken the decision to move or not, and with that the responsibility of it working out, or not on yourself. Is that necessary? Is your wife in a position to discuss such a big decision Or is she too fragile at the moment? How does she feel at the idea, does she think it will help?

You could ask in her hospital how her care there would compare with the rest of the country.

Best of luck op, I hope it all works out for you.

kunst nugget

The first thing I'd say is now is not the time to try and make big decisions. Moving out of the city is something that can be done in the future. Concentrating on you and your wife is the most important priority right now. Make sure you have people you can talk too - having support for yourself is of vital importance at the moment.

Just in regards to her not getting adequate talk therapy at the moment, as far as I know generally they try to get the medication levels right first before they start with proper counselling - if a person is in too distressed a state of mind, talk therapy will be of little benefit.

Good luck in the future and I hope everything works out for you and your wife.

Sleepy

Just a thought: you seem to have moved on from the infidelities yet you say she's still traumatised by them and it's "too much" for you to help her work through her own feelings on it. Have you ever actually told her that you forgive her for them? That you're prepared to accept them as a result of her illness and leave them in the past?

You could preface the conversation by stating that you don't want to get into it in detail but (presuming I'm taking up your feelings on the matter correctly) that you want to know that you forgive her and it's in the past now.

Maybe it won't help at all but in my own experience, the words "I forgive you" can be very powerful.

kunst nugget

Sleepy wrote: »

Just a thought: you seem to have moved on from the infidelities yet you say she's still traumatised by them and it's "too much" for you to help her work through her own feelings on it. Have you ever actually told her that you forgive her for them? That you're prepared to accept them as a result of her illness and leave them in the past?

You could preface the conversation by stating that you don't want to get into it in detail but (presuming I'm taking up your feelings on the matter correctly) that you want to know that you forgive her and it's in the past now.

Maybe it won't help at all but in my own experience, the words "I forgive you" can be very powerful.

While the OP saying 'I forgive you' will be a huge benefit it won't really help until his wife can learn to have some empathy for herself. Tbh, she sounds like she a long way away from that at the moment. Hopefully this will come with time.

LegacyUser

OP here.

I have told her repeatedly "I forgive you", but it did take some time for me to get there because I couldn't believe that these things had happened as I thought we were as close as any two people could be. Anyways that's in the past now, I'm looking to the future. The problem is that she can't seem to forgive or have much empathy for herself. She thinks that this illness is her karma for lying, but she did actually have this illness (undiagnosed) before we met but never told me about her problems - she wanted to be perfect for me ( I never asked her to be!). Now she feels like she's wasting my life and I deserve better, and it is kinda frustrating trying to always do the right thing but still hitting a brick wall. I think her f*cked up parents never gave her enough love and as a therapist explained to me that when you don't have that basic love then you never think you are worth much or deserving of love. I think she is waking up to the fact that her family let her down severely and that a lot of damage has been done, she is finally starting to get a bit angry at them, but anger does not come naturally to her and it freaks her out a bit to feel it.

At the moment she wants to stay in hospital and I'm a little wary of her getting too fond of being in there...I'm also thinking that antipsychotic medication is causing more stress (restlessness, trouble sleeping etc) than good but I know we have to be a bit patient with that to see if it helps.

With the talk therapy, my instinct tells me that it would do her the world of good if she could find the right person...my wife is a very proactive person, a bit too proactive and hyper sometimes, so I think it's the fact that she has little to occupy her time that is causing stress too. In a bizarre way, I actually think her doing a lot more would be better for her rather than resting indefinitely. It's been a year now since she was first admitted to hospital and I know it's dragging her down a bit. She has too much time for thinking, and that's not a good thing for her right now. I am going to cool it with moving down the country until I know what the medical facilities are like, but we are going to move at some stage definitely because financially I can't carry us both living in Dublin.

Thanks for all the replies. It's very much appreciated.

FairytaleGirl

I think for the moment she is in the right place. I know your not 100% sold on the medication, but fact of the matter is that she needs to be stabilised before she can commence any talking therapy or otherwise.

<mod snip>

By the way, you're doing great with her by the sounds of it.

Tokyo

FairytaleGirl - offering a medical diagnosis, even with the best of intention, is forbidden by the forum charter. Please take the time out to read the charter before posting again.

Regards,
Mike

Semele

senorsoup wrote: »

With the talk therapy, my instinct tells me that it would do her the world of good if she could find the right person...my wife is a very proactive person, a bit too proactive and hyper sometimes, so I think it's the fact that she has little to occupy her time that is causing stress too. In a bizarre way, I actually think her doing a lot more would be better for her rather than resting indefinitely. It's been a year now since she was first admitted to hospital and I know it's dragging her down a bit. She has too much time for thinking, and that's not a good thing for her right now. I am going to cool it with moving down the country until I know what the medical facilities are like, but we are going to move at some stage definitely because financially I can't carry us both living in Dublin.

Thanks for all the replies. It's very much appreciated.

Just to pick up on some of this OP- you feel that having so much time on her hands is not the most helpful thing for your wife right now, if I understand that right. That's an obvious thing to think, but that may be exactly what's needed to really address the issues. As a therapist myself, I often see clients whose way of coping with distress over the course of their lives has been to keep so busy they don't have to think about it. For a lot of these people, having nothing to think of but themselves was incredibly frightening and was intolerable really, to the point that they were initially only interested in solutions that were proactive and involved doing things rather than having up to just sit with themselves.

A large part of what I help clients to do is to gradually increase their ability to tolerate distressing thoughts/feelings/memories. To make any real change to these you have to be ready and willing to experience and examine them. People reach crisis points in life where their coping strategies drastically fail, and this is usually the point at which people seek help (or are compelled to by others). However, once the crisis point passes a little, you often see this equally fast "flight to health", where the person resorts to avoidant coping strategies to again get away from the distress that feels so intolerable. A lot of the time clients and their family members will see this as a return to normality and a sign that everything can be ok again.

The real challenge at this stage is to almost slow down the process of recovery and make sure that it comes from genuinely working through/resolving issues rather than just papering over them. This can be a very difficult and frustrating stage for both clients and their loved ones, who can often feel that therapy is "making things worse". Unfortunately, this is often unavoidable! I know even from my own experiences that the process of therapy isn't a straight upwards trend from feeling bad to feeling better. Having to deal with things that you have constructed your whole life around avoiding is a nasty and painful process, but is the only thing that brings real healing. I often use the phrase "the only way out is through"...if your wife were to leave hospital or go back to a more normal and active lifestyle then sure, she may seem more normal, less depressed or whatever, but the underlying causes of her distress haven't been dealt with. All she will have done is take a detour that will likely end up right back at the same place further down the line, potentially with more damage caused that will then be harder again to tolerate and heal.

It must be incredibly hard for you to see her the way she is, but she really should take as long as she needs right now to work through things. I would advise you to have some counselling yourself during this time, as it is a huge emotional burden on you too.

blatantrereg

Have very similar experiences, minus the infidelity. I didn't hold any bad feeling over what I discovered were symptoms of an illness once the diagnosis was made. I don't know if I would have felt that way if there was infidelity or violence against people/animals though. [I didn't infer violence in your story, just commenting.]

The waiting lists are huge for non-private CBT. This is because CBT therapists make a huge amount more privately than they do publically, so there is no incentive beyond altruism for them to offer their services via the public system, unless they cannot get work privately for some reason.

Other public counselling services refused to offer their services, on the grounds that they aren't qualified to deal with this sort of condition. Eventually an appointment with a nurse was given for talking. They just said that she had a good understanding of her condition and was stable. They didn't have much help to offer as regards the sort of help actually being sought, which boils down to -how do you stop this happening again, and how do you recognise when it starts to happen early on.

I would definitely look before you leap as regards moving. Moving home can trigger an episode. It can also result in a level of isolation, if ytou don't know people nearby. You are absolutely right to be wary of losing good medical services you can avail of. The psychiatric hospital in our locality is not a good place, for example.

Medication is necessary for mania unfortunately. Trouble sleeping and restlessness is a symptom and indicator of mania, so it might be incorrect to attribute that to the medication. There is a variety of drugs used, and sometimes an excess in my opinion. Some of the drugs she was initally given had distressing side-effects including hallucinations. We wanted the most conservative use of medication possible. A GP with expertise in the condition helped with this. Low dosage of lithium alone worked far better and with far less significant side effects.

Her feeling uncomfortable about being angry with her family might be because she is worried that she is becoming manic when she experiences emotion like that. It is a mood disorder, and emotions being more powerful than normal is a defining feature of it.

I think that if she is restless and too full of energy and wants to return to hospital then it might be a mistake to discourage her from doing so. I think it is a mistake to assume that it is due to the medication.

What struck me was how common BP is, and how little awareness there is of it. It's very strange and probably down to stigma I guess. Personally I discovered I had absolutely no real understanding of it, or knowledge of what it really is. It is important to develop an understanding of the condition. One thing that might sweeten the pill is that it is proven to be linked to creative genius, and a lot of the most esteemed writers, artists and musicians in history and today had it.