I have had a separate thread (Wife suddenly ended our marriage and has left our home) describing what has been happening until recently. I had not replied to it for a while as there had been lots of ups and down, and I was trying to focus my available energy on my ‘Fog of Care’ project. However, today I received divorce papers from a court in Florida.
The short story up to this point is that after a 2 year period of remission between April 2021 and April 2023, my wife had seemed to have been cycling in and out of moderate mania for about 14 months between April 2023 and June 2024, going from having negative feelings for me to adoring me. Last June things got rapidly worse, coinciding with her getting Covid for the first time. She suddenly went very flat and left our home, leaving me with two months in utter panic and desperately trying to get the services to recognise that she needed help, before she returned home in complete psychosis. Two months of being in and out of hospital followed, with her eventually appearing to have come to her senses, asking for me to put in charge of her care and wanting to come home and try to rebuild our marriage. Prior to her release the doctor in charge had pleaded with my Wife to try going on lithium as she believed my wife had been in a state of mania for an extended time, but she refused.
Within three days of her returning she was talking about leaving, she was displaying signs of mania again, and by November she had left the country, returning from the UK to the US. Within two weeks she was back in hospital. When she came out she was wearing her wedding ring again, completely adoring me, and planning for me to visit, until she flipped just before xmas. There were two further hospitalisations since then, both due to my intervention when her mother (whom she now lives with) was refusing to get help things were clearly critical.
It looks like she initially requested the divorce papers shortly before a hospitalisation instigated by myself in January. She did not process them at that time. I had traveled to the US the following week to support her, and at the time it seemed like she was considering reconciliation.
On that trip I had agreed a plan of action with her mother that we would contact the 24 hour crisis team at the first sign of there being a problem. Her mother was trying to tell me that I had called in the police too quickly. Just a couple of weeks ago I got the police report into her Baker Acting on that occasion. I am now aware that at that time in front of the police my wife had expressed a desire to commit significant acts of violence. She was clearly exceptionally ill, and whether there was intent is another question, but it was inexcusable to resist getting help as my mother-in-law had done.
A few weeks after that my wife suddenly turned on me again with a completely unfair sudden bought of ranting at me. Knowing this pattern, I expected her to be getting unwell. I attempted to speak with my mother-in-law saying that my wife had sent me a lot of messages and did she think something might be up, but she did not reply. Then my wife was rage messaging me that I was contacting her family. At this point I discussed it with my Wife’s brother, who had been unaware of how bad the situation had been until recently and was taking more interest. The outcome of that was he thought we should just contact the crisis team, which I did. On two occasions the crisis team were turned away by my mother-in-law. I got a further abusive screaming phone call from my wife in relation to this. On the second occasion the police were with the crisis team, and they did an assessment and deemed my Wife was not in need of Baker Acting.
10 days and 5 driving citations later, I get a call from my Wife, clearly in psychosis, asking me to help her with IT at her workplace. She told me she had been telling everyone in her workplace how wonderful I was. You could hear people in the background bewildered at her behaviour. She stepped outside and said to me “Look, I really called you because I just wanted to tell you that I really love you. You are my life partner and my companion”. I knew she was unwell, but I just said “Thank you. We have had some good times, haven’t we?” and she said “We really have”. I really do feel that through all of the illness and darkness that she really meant it.
I had already had calls from friends saying she was posting weird stuff on social media, so I had been in touch with the services again. My wife decided to go home for lunch, but on the way back she apparently did something driving out of the car park that resulted in her dismissal. When she got home a police officer caught up with her and I got a phone call. My wife called me asking why I had called the police, and after I initially forgot I had spoken to them, I said I was expecting them to call me to discuss what to do for her. The police officer asked her a few questions and again deemed her to be fit and not need Baker Acting, even though she had just go a citation for dangerous driving on the way home.
A few hours later she called me from a private accessible building, and with help from another family member we directed the police to her and finally got her Baker Acted. At the hospital she was immediately recognised to be in acute psychosis, and was admitted for 5 days. Upon release her brother got her to agree to go into a longer term mental health rehab facility. Her mother was completely opposed to this, to the point of screaming at her that my wife would suffer sexual assault and be murdered there. My wife went in, and I called them to give them more case history, and she had listed me as an approved contact. The nurse I spoken to told me she had be talking about me in very positive terms again. The next day she wanted to leave and she called me to discuss it with the worker present. She eventually decided to leave.
A week went by and there was a flare up about a disagreement with a garage she had asked to assess her car for repair. My wife may have had reason for grievance against the garage, but she was unable to contain her rage. I was trying to help get it straightened out, and I got involved in group call with the garage owner, but my wife was screaming in the call, and just could not see how that was not helping. In the end decided it was not worth the stress and I offered to cover the cost of the disagreement, and send my wife what I could afford this month to cover it, the rest coming next month. As it happened after I sent the money, after the call she came to a much better agreement to pay about a 5th of what they were originally proposing to charge.
So that was all looking great, until she decided to go there early in the morning with her mother. The best I can gather is that one or both of them started raging at the staff there, that they then called the police, and the owner was so angry about it that he insisted they pay the original charge plus some. I spoke with the owner and tried to smooth it out, but what he described was not good, and he said he had video footage. He himself seemed bewildered as it should have been a done deal. My Wife said it was all her mother’s fault, but unfortunately I do not think my Wife fully appreciates how her own behaviour can be affected when her mother is going off her rocker. I told her that I thought the deal was gone, she would have to settle with paying the amount he was insisting, but that I would cover it. I was then faced with her raging, saying I was “not on her side” and being “a coward”.
At this point, whilst she was raging, she said she would have to progress the divorce. And she did. The date on the papers for the actual filing is that very same day. I believe it was the next day, probably faced with a court case for dangerous driving and multiple fines, and being at risk of losing her license, that she agreed to go on lithium. I was expecting her to be hospitalised again following the regular pattern, but over the following weeks she appears to have been getting a bit more regulated, and she has been somewhat more friendly to me, without many significant conversations.
I feel like just at the point she is starting to look a bit more stable, she has taken action to finalize the destruction of our marriage. If she had taken the lithium last September, things could have been completely different now. I do not have any money for legal representation, so I am planning on writing a representation myself, and just citing whatever documents I have on hand, and explaining that when she filed the paperwork, my wife clearly did not have mental capacity to state that the marriage was irreconcilably lost. Can anybody offer any experience?
I know people often get as far as filing papers and then back out, but I feel like this has ended our last chance of me emmigrating to the US. My wife also has a very “in for a penny, in for a pound” type attitude when she makes rash decisions when unwell, and then comes round and regrets them. She seems to rather try and convince herself she was making a rational decision rather than accept it was done out of illness. The amount of abuse and blame I have taken for this illness is very sad. On the day she did this she was saying “I know why I get angry, it is because of you!” In that case I gave her my time, my effort, my diplomacy, and when that all failed I gave her money I could not afford to try and make it go away, and between her and her mother, they managed to mess it up, and then they still blamed me and were angry with me. Neither of them can take any accountability for their actions. Rather than saying “do you know what, maybe he was just trying to fix this, and we might have conducted ourselves in a terrible way”, they had to scapegoat me.
I think that I can present a significant chunk of evidence in my initial representation to the court. There are repeated incidents of my Wife cycling between adoration and hatred. It is too soon after starting the lithium to know what she is really thinking when well. I just do not know if I write a great big thing up if the court will take any notice.