Hello, I’m new here. I’ve read some of the other posts and thought I would share my story with people who have been in a similar situation - I have no idea how to move forward and would love any advice.
My wife was diagnosed with delusional disorder and PTSD about 5 years ago. DD is a subset of schizophrenia but has very limited online support as it is a much smaller population. The main difference between DD & schizophrenia (at least how I understand it) is there are typically no visual or auditory hallucinations - just an altered sense of reality. She has a 100% VA disability rating due to this (permanent & total) and I am her approved VA Caregiver through the VA Caregiver program.
My wife has a history of thinking that she is being drugged - she has been admitted to the local VA on several occasions due to these psychotic beliefs. She has never done anything dangerous or threatened to as she is very aware of her surroundings and knows that if she were to say certain things she would be involuntarily committed.
The current crisis that we are in is that we bought a new house about 3 months ago. When walking through the house (new construction) my wife became agitated and her heart started to race. There were some very strong smells from the new construction but she was confident that she was drugged and started to panic. Once we got home we took drug tests that came back negative - we took approximately 30+ drug tests over the next few weeks - all with a negative result. She does not believe that they are negative and still believes that she has been drugged. We actually bought the house (I wasn’t fully aware of how severe her situation was at the time) but she continued to claim she was being drugged after moving in. She bought several surface detection kits off of Amazon to test certain surfaces for drugs. One of the tests did appear to come back positive - but upon reading the package and calling the company who manufactured it was explained that it doesn’t mean it is positive it means that it is a “potential positive and further analysis needs to be done”. Upon learning this I contacted the local authorities and the Department of Homeland Security came out and tested the entire house with their equipment and determined that there were no harmful substances or narcotics. My wife did not believe this and ended up leaving the house. She was shortly thereafter admitted to the local psych ward where she was medicated with Abilify. The paranoia and psychosis lifted and she came home 10 days later. After being home for 2 days she stopped taking her meds and became paranoid again and went to live with her parents 8 hours away. She stayed there for 1 month and moved back into town and got her own townhouse.
We share a 6 year old son who she barely sees anymore because of this - we can’t be around her unless we are wearing new clothes that have never been in the house. She wants me to move in with her and leave all of our belongings in the house and start over fresh.
My life has been turned upside down and I don’t know what to do. Her doctor wants her to be inpatient again so they can get her medications right but she thinks he’s wrong and won’t entertain taking any medications at all. She refuses any sort of help and I have no idea what to do to get our life back.