My mother has lived with me since my sister passed 15 years ago. I bought a house and had her move in because I didn’t think she was strong enough at the time to be on her own and wanted her to heal. I thought she would eventually start over and move on with her life, 15 years later she still lives with me and is breaking my heart. My husband moved in 3 years after I bought the house knowing my mother lived there as we learned together she was really sick, after a long hard heart breaking struggle we got her admitted to the hospital and diagnosed but soon after she left the hospital she stopped taking her meds and has not evolved since she moved in. She has no friends, no hobbies and does a little house work and tells us she does everything (she hardly does anything and not the way we need it done). She has her first glass of wine at 11 - 12am everyday. She says she sips the wine but we go through a lot of wine boxes. She just sits in her room and stares out into nowhere most of the all day or sleeps. I say mom why don’t you join some social groups and she says her hearing is bad and can’t hear anything (her hearing is bad) or I try to talk to her but all she does is talk about the old days and blames people or talks about her dead relatives that were killed that don’t exist or about how the state of Connecticut owes her money and land. I say come work at my shop with me to get out of the house and to be creative and she says I don’t want to, I am not interested in being creative in (I am an Artist and my mother is extremely artistic) your shop I would rather do something different but she doesn’t do anything. My mother and my husband dislike each other immensely at this point and she tells him he can leave than I say he is not going anywhere and If she is unhappy she can leave (a lot of arguing and no communication). You cannot communicate with her or compromise basically it is like talking to the wall. I have not support system, her family isn’t interested in helping or hardly and both my brother and sister passed away young from (SUDP - sudden death from Epilepsy). My father ran for the hills back in the 80’s and has a new life with a new wife.
She blames me for things that happened as a teenager, not taking her out enough and tells me I don’t do anything with her and I don’t spend time talking to her like I did along time ago, she says she has no friends but doesn’t do anything about it. Says she is moving out but is definitely not strong enough to do anything. I told her yesterday after listening to her talk and yell at the radio for hours (delusions and hallucinations) the day before that she needs to go back to therapy and she just says she drank to much and there is nothing wrong and yells and gets mad when ever I tell her she needs help. She would rather blame me and make me feel horrible when all she is doing is ruining my life! I feel horrible and guilty all of the time for doing the right thing, I don’t know what to do with her or how to get her back to the hospital or to therapy. HELPPPPP MEEEE PLEASE!
Take her to the emergency room and tell them she is a danger to herself. My uncle drank to self medicate, but it would cancel out the medication he was on. She will have to go into rehab to stop the drinking. She can’t drink while she is on medication.
I have Schizophrenia, and my mom might be getting dementia and diabetes.
You can also contact your local NAMI organization for support.
Sounds more like dementia (from here) than sz, but one can look into all the stuff on the amazon pages about these books to see what may be going on, and then dig into the suggestions that follow.
- Get a copy of these books, read them and have your family read them, as well. (Torrey can be a bit totalistic and unwilling to see exceptions to his “rules” at times, but most of his book is really worth the effort to plough through.)
http://www.amazon.com/Surviving-Schizophrenia-6th-Edition-Family/dp/0062268856
http://www.amazon.com/The-Complete-Family-Guide-Schizophrenia/dp/1593851804/ref=as_sl_pc_tf_til?tag=schizophren0c-20&linkCode=w00&linkId=XKLY6NWSWJSQ3VYN&creativeASIN=1593851804
- Get properly diagnosed by a board-certified psychopharmacologist who specializes in the psychotic disorders. One can find them at…
Find Top Psychiatrists by State. andhttps://psychiatrists.psychologytoday.com/rms/
. - Work with that “psychiatrist” (or “p-doc”) to develop a medication formula that stabilizes their symptoms sufficiently so that they can tackle the psychotherapy that will disentangle their thinking IF they are not too far down the road into the physiological deterioration of dementia (because these therapies are pointless and counterproductive for most dementia patients even though they are often very useful for their caregivers).
. - The best of the psychotherapies for that currently include…
DBT – What is Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)? – Behavioral Tech
MBSR – http://www.mindfullivingprograms.com/whatMBSR.php
MBCT - Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy: theory and practice - PubMed
ACT – ACT | Association for Contextual Behavioral Science
10 StEP – Pair A Docks: The 10 StEPs of Emotion Processing
. - the even newer somatic psychotherapies like…
MBBT – An Introduction to Mind-Body Bridging & the I-System – New Harbinger Publications, Inc
SEPT – Somatic experiencing - Wikipedia
SMPT – Sensorimotor psychotherapy - Wikipedia
. - or standard CBTs, like…
REBT – Rational emotive behavior therapy - Wikipedia
Schematherapy – Schema therapy - Wikipedia
Learned Optimism – Learned optimism - Wikipedia
Standard CBT – Psychotherapy | NAMI: National Alliance on Mental Illness & scroll down
. - If you/she/he needs a professional intervention to get through treatment resistance, tell me where you live, and I will get back to you with leads to those services.
. - Look into the RAISE Project at Google.
. - Look for mental illness clubhouses in your area (which can be hugely helpful… but may also pose risks). Dig through the many articles at Google to locate and investigate them.
I feel your pain. I wish i could help with some ideas
About half that (the non sz stuff) sounds like my grandmother. Do you have the money to put her in a nursing home? Both my grandmothers are in one.
Grammy loves hers. She has a ton of friends, breakfast friends, bridge club friends, I can still drive so I can take you places friends. Lots of times when we get back home (we moved to the South over ten years ago) she doesn’t see us much for a couple of days because she has other commitments. It really makes me very happy. She isn’t just sitting there waiting at the door for her children and grandchildren. She’s the one with the busy life style.
Mimi hates hers though. To be 500% fair your mother is like Mimi not Grammy. I mentioned Grammy to show what a good one can be like for someone who’s open to the experience. My Mimi lost her right leg below the knee. She can barely push herself around (she has carpet but still…) because she never goes anywhere so she has no muscle tone. She has a small two bedroom apartment at her nursing home and she doesn’t even go in the second bedroom or bathroom. (To be fair they do get used by company when they come). She complains about being lonely even though she won’t go out and socialize (it’s worse than with your mom, instead of just going out and maybe making friends Mimi lives in the same home as a bunch of incredibly nice seniors that would all love to be her friend. That isn’t hyperbole, I’ve met some of these people).
I know it sounds heartless and I know it sounds cruel to do this and I guess it might be but my Mimi would have been like this (and was like this) before she went to ML. She relied on my uncle L to take care of her and she never left the house. If your mother has dementia (like notmoses suggests) they can do more for her than you can. That’s why my Mimi went to ML. We knew her health was going to take a plunge and they have a hospice building in the facility. There’s actually some forced socialization because she has a care giver who comes and tidies up, does her laundry, and keeps her company a little.
She’s going to do what she’s going to do. You can either have her there making you miserable or she can go somewhere else and make them miserable. I think that she would be easier for you to love from a distance. I love my Mimi but when I stayed with her for the week of Thanksgiving I was ready to shoot myself. Distance makes the heart grow fonder even if that distance is just down the road.