Hello everyone,
This is my first post, and I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to post, so I started by looking for other posts of this type. I haven’t found very much so here goes:
A week ago, I awoke to noises at around midnight to find police officers in my house and my wife telling them that I have been poisoning her. I had to go downstairs and talk to them. She accused me of forcing her (under hypnosis) to eat moth balls. She also said I had poisoned the drinks in the refrigerator with antifreeze. I spoke to the police, answered their questions, and they basically immediately knew it was a mental health issue.
Getting an ambulance to take her to the hospital was not a problem. In fact, she demanded one because she was certain that she was dying from the poison and was distraught enough to actually call 911 a second time and ask for an ambulance at the very moment that there were already two police officers in the room with her.
By 1:30, they had all left. I was counseled to not go to the hospital but was told which hospital she was in. I called them around 4-5am (no sleep of course. I am shaking now just calling up the memory.) I could infer that she had been admitted to the ER for testing, but otherwise they gave me no information.
I received a call later when I was at work by an evaluator who asked me a lot of questions about her and her history (she is from Brazil so the medical history isn’t readily available as we live in the US). I tried to give whatever information I could, but really couldn’t get anything back. Clearly HIPAA was the problem as she had not consented to visits or information sharing with or from me. The evaluator at least could tell me that she was in the crisis center, had cleared medical (which I believe means that they had done the right tests to see if she really was being poisoned, and come up negative) and was possibly going to transfer out to a psych ward that was not part of the ER.
That was the last I have heard from the hospital. It has now been a week. I got in touch with our Pastor, who has called her a few times and also brought her some clothes and stuff that I gave him (that she requested). He said that she still thinks I am trying to kill her and does not want contact.
I feel terribly alone. I can’t take up my Pastor’s whole life and have been reaching out to whoever I can just to feel some sense of community. I guess that’s why I posted here. My closest family is 800 miles away. I have friends here, and work keeps me distracted, but I’m really breaking down from the stress of this. The worst part is just not knowing anything about what is happening with her. I really need to talk to the physician in charge of her case, but nobody will contact me. HIPAA?
What will happen? Will they release her and not tell me? Will she just show up one day? Will she be dangerous if she still has such strong delusions? She has never shown violent tendencies.
There is a long backstory which I won’t go in to on this first post. She has had a pattern of increasing paranoia since we have been together, and I think it was really me who was in denial about it, mainly because I knew that if it ever got to the point where it is now, that there would be no chance of us ever having a “normal” life. I had just hoped that one day we would stop fighting so much, and find a more peaceful life, and that she would learn to trust me. Now, dejected, I have to come to terms with the fact that this is a serious mental illness. She has never been open to the idea (I have spoken of it in the past and gotten angry resistance).
I’m most of the way through “I’m not sick. I don’t need help”. the problem so far is how can one reach a person when one IS the target of their paranoia? She used to target her birth family, but now it’s me.
This is the first actual hospitalization and the first time with any sort of psychiatric treatment since I have known her. I assume that she has never had any extensive treatment, since it might have been on records that were part of the USCIS screening for her to enter the U.S.