Wife suddenly ended our marriage and has left our home

Family
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I have not had a chance to reply, but a lot has happened, and for legal reasons I can not say everything. However, my wife reached out to me on the exact day I predicted, in a state of total psychosis. Family had already reached out to me saying that her social media had gone crazy and she appeared to be in a full episode. I was already heading to her when she decided to come to me and I met her on the way. We came to our home and she seemed calm and but I could tell she was on the verge of violence. She very quickly told me that she had taken out a Domestic Abuse Visa, on the basis of claims of me abusing her (the claims are absolutely bananas). I was waiting for a call back from her Community Mental Health Team when I she decided to go outside for a walk, and I went with her. She walked right out in front of fast moving traffic very slowly, and I had to run out and try and stop it, which was quite dangerous. At that point when I got her back I decided to call and ambulance and wait outside and I did not feel safe with her. The ambulance paramedics were very good. I told them she had been away for two months and I thought she would suddenly be violent. When we got to the hospital she was causing enough of a disturbance that we put in a separate room, but I made it clear that I did not want be alone with her. Eventually she was looking like she was not co-operating and was going to try to leave, so I told them they needed to get a nurse there now. They got the nurse in and she would not talk whilst I was there, so I left the room. I was sat outside for a couple of minutes and I suddenly heard a load of screaming. I looked over my shoulder wondering where it was coming from, and I suddenly realised it was my wife. I came back to the room to see the nurse and paramedics backing out of the room and my wife in a foetal positions, backside pointing up in the air, and still screaming. She had thrown tea and coffee all over the place and had tried to attack the paramedics and nurse. And thank goodness that she did because I think that confirmed that she would be admitted.

So she has been in a secure mental hospital since then. I have a picture of what happened before and after she left and there is a catalogue of incompetence. I have to be careful about what I say, but basically every time I called the community mental health team and said my wife was putting me in fear of harm, or was appearing to have problems, they were ignoring it and treating it as a attempt to control my wife. However, I now know that the reality is that for months she was frequently going in and out the first stage of an episode, going into the erotomania/hypersexual stage and developing crushes on lots of people and alienating from me. She was flat denying there was a problem to the doctor and he just believed it. My wife initially said she mad a mistake leaving me, but at present she massively resents me. It is a roller-coaster still. There is a lot more to this I can not discuss at present.

1 Like
42

I am very glad she is finally getting the acute care she needs. Often it takes a crisis. Hopefully she will be stabilized and able to gain some perspective. Good luck to you in managing this difficult period!

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Good job you, you weren’t injured, your wife wasn’t injured and you have her in a secure mental hospital.

Our close friend’s wife is still mid crisis. She filed for divorce, this will be an expensive episode as he had to hire a lawyer to represent him in the divorce. Her rapid cycling continues, a couple of times a week she doesn’t want the divorce to continue, followed immediately by once again pursuing the divorce.

We all keep waiting for the episode to end. It’s a big mess for the supporting family and its hell for the 8 year old.

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Hi, @LowProfiler I am in similar situation like you.
My partner for 4 years left me suddenly, and he turned from being av loving and warm person into a cruel and cold person I don’t know anymore. Like you experienced with you wife.
When I read this tread I felt your pain too, because I know what you’re been going through emotionally and pscychologically. And I feel relieved on your behalf that you finally got your wife hospitalized.

My partner is still in his episode and he has been there since midth of January. He’s been on a too low dosage since December 2020, and still is. He started to show symptoms a month later (January 2021) with anger outburst and irritation, but the doctor wouldn’t change the dosage back. The symptoms has been on and off since then (2021) with an increase from September 2023, in which he ended our relationship in January this year.

I didn’t knew much about SZ until the spring this year. I realized that I have to gain more insight, so I started to search for information, and I found this board. With more knowlegde about the SZ I see that my partner has poor insight into his disease, also when he was on his old dosage.
I’ve also realized that my partners cold and indifferent behavior for 5 days in November 2023 was a warningsign of what was about to come. I did not understand that then, because I knew too little about the disease.

So I am waiting to gain more contact with my partner. He responds immediately when I text him messages, and he wants to meet, but later in the autumn. This positive and gives me a little hope that I can reach him, and I will try to use LEAP to make him understand that he needs to do something about his medication. He behaves and speaks odd, and is unstable. It is not difficult for me to see that he’s not how he used to be. It’s like he’s not in touch with his self, so I my goal is to get him help, and hopefully make him too see that he needs it too, by using LEAP.

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I have had to just decide that I have to divorce my wife. She has done things that might be driven by illness or not, but she has done things that are just unacceptable. One of the biggest things is that she has put in an application for a Domestic Abuse visa. She was rattling through some of the things they put in the application whilst she was in heavily in the psychosis. At best it was utterly bananas and at worst cynical and a terrible betrayal. One of the claims of abuse was that I did not allow her to drink coffee on a Saturday night. I absolutely did not do that, I might have suggested it affected her sleep, but there was no way I could of disallowed her from drinking coffee. But is that grounds to award domestic abuse visa? She claimed financial abuse. This is in spite of her walking away with all of our money (about ÂŁ25,000) which was going to be the deposit on our house. So on what basis could she claim this? Because I prevented her from getting her teeth straightened at a cost of ÂŁ2000. I freely admit that I was quite firmly opposed to this, but one key piece of information that she left out of the document was that she got her teeth straightened three years ago. Even the salespeople were telling her there was no point doing it because the change would be so small it would be within the margin of error.

The main thrust of the application is based on the idea that I had been making false reports about concerns about my wife’s health to try and maintain control over her. It turns out they were asking if my wife was ok, she said “yes” and that was it, I was a bad guy. The funny thing is, within two months of being out of my care she had the biggest episode she had in three years. Also, my wife admitted that she had basically been sliding in and out of the early phases of episodes since at least last June and she was just not reporting it to the doctor. The doctor actually wrote a letter in support of the visa application saying that I was making false reports to maintain control of her in spite of her being perfectly well. It all looks a bit shakey now given the state she has been in. The idea that I ever had control of my wife is ludicrous anyway. There is another twist in this, but for legal reasons I can not talk about it yet.

Lastly, and this really is disgusting, my wife had a recording of me from some time ago, at my wits end and broken down in a mess, where I am sounding suicidal and saying I don’t know what is going to happen and that I need help. They used that as evidence of my trying to emotionally blackmail her. The truth is I have been drifting into a suicidal state whilst trying to support my wife over the course of a year. At a moment where I was clearly asking for help, she thought “ahh, I might be able to use this for my own ends” and not for a moment did she think “my husband needs help”. It is just disgusting and whether my wife was sick or not, it shows a mercenary aspect of her that does not value me in the slightest.

When she got sick I was there to get her to help. I stuck with her for 9 hours in the General Hospital. I went to visit her in the mental hospital when she was too dangerous for anybody else to see. I was the one that got the call to go back when she picked a fight with three women, got put in the de-escalation room and then started stripping off. I was the one that got her headphones without wires, who brought her guitar, new tweezers etc. I was the one who traveled a round trip of three hours each day after work to maybe have her throw me out in a temper after 15 minutes. I was the one that stood by her every single point she needed me for the last 5 years. And what did she do? She drove me to the lowest point of my life and thought “ahh, that’s handy, I’ll use this recording so I can claim this man that loves me is an abuser”. And a load of people around her endorsed that.

No, that is enough for me. One day my wife could well be famous, and it will be a disaster for her. In a tiny group of people, when she has a little bit of local fame, she has already been hopelessly manipulated and exploited. She was sick when she left and she has lost her ability to make her own decisions. But I can not take anymore. When she is well she is the person I married, but she is vile now, and she has betrayed me in a callous and selfish way. I hope she can come out and be stable, but if she is about to enter an extended cycle of illness with short spells of remission, then she will be a dangerous person when at large.

I had her father staying with me last week and I watched her utterly destroy him over the course of a week. She has been doing that to me. I am now actually getting support from a domestic abuse team for things she has done to me. She is always going to be attracted to exciting things like a moth to a flame, resist regulation and then likely get sick. She has thrown away an incredible husband. I just do not want to be involved with her anymore. She did not just reject me, she appears to have rejected an entire stable way of thinking.

46

You need to protect yourself. The infernal unpredictability of this disorder is often the thing that keeps us hanging on, hoping something will change. If she continues to behave like this even after the acute care (and meds?) she received, I doubt she will improve enough to be a real partner to you again. I hope you can summon the courage to cut yourself loose from her this time.

1 Like
47

What can I say, I am out of words! I’m so sorry for you and for her, and that you’ve come to the conclusion to divorce your wife. But I understand you and how you may feel. It’s demanding for the relationship and devastating for your self-esteem and your own mental wellbeing in the long run to be with someone with SZ, if you don’t take care of your self.

What you write gives cruelty a different meaning for me. And I think maybe it’s more correct to call my partner emotionless and cold, than cruel, when I read what you’ve experienced with your wife.

It’s horrible that she have treatened you like this. Her psychosis is surely turned against you. And it’s not helpful that people around her, like friends and the doctor believes/taken part in her psychosis, without questioning her behavior when they know about her diagnosis. As I have understood it’s normal that this can happen. It’s lonely when other people don’t understand what you’re going through and don’t see that she is sick.

No, it’s not. I can relate to this. My partner is angry with me for a similar thing, but that happened after he left me. He is angry because he could not stay up all night when we were together. Like you I suggested something similar, that it’s nicer for us that we have the same sleep routine the weeks we’re living together, and he agreed. He changed his routines and from that moment he has only talked about how cozy it is when we can eat breakfast together. But after he ende our relasionship he have changed his thoughts and thinks that I did not allowed him to be up at night. This is odd and not how it really was, because he has «come to this conclusion» long after he broke up, not when we were a couple.

It’s quite shocking how the SZ can trick their doctor! I think my partner is doing the same, but then I wonder how competent the doctor is. They should know about how their patients could fake being well and still manage to ask them the right questions and see that they’re psychotic and/or delusional. Your wife seems to have lost a part of her insight or maybe hiding that she wasn’t well to avoid more medication or hospitalization.

I really know your frustration you feel about everything you have done for her, and that she not sees it. I’ve done alot for my partner too, but he’s not capable of see it because of his SZ.

Remember that how she behaves towards you is all about the disease.
Several people have told me that I have to remember that my partner’s behavior has notting to do with me, his feelings for me or about the relationship. It’s all about the disease.

I am sending you warm thoughts!

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I agree you must protect yourself at this point
It takes strength to leave and start your oen healing journey