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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm so glad she survived, OP.  I lost my brother to bipolar disorder by suicide, and my mother attempted suicide a number of times when I was a child.  I am so glad you are there for your child, and I am so glad that you love your wife and want to support her.  It is really okay to be angry, too, and scared and hurt.

Unless you have reason to believe otherwise, please do approach this from the perspective that she was not in her right mind when she made this "choice".  I read some really nasty judgmental posts above, and I think it's important to look at this from the knowledge that her brain is very, very broken right now, and not able to function in a way that allows her to see rational options in front of her.  Just like kidney disease prevents those organs from functioning correctly, her brain illness is preventing her from seeing how much she is loved and needed and wanted.  There's a really good chance that somehow her sick brain convinced her that what she did was best for you.  (I had a really close friend who attempted suicide when her girls were young, 100% convinced that she was doing the best thing to ensure their happiness and security.  It was completely nuts, but a totally unselfish gesture from the point of her crazy brain.)  What she chose, depending on what her brain was telling her, was not necessarily selfish or weak or cruel.  She might honestly have thought she was doing you a favor.

It is SO frustrating and heartbreaking when we can't just logic someone or love someone out of a brain illness.  But if you think of it as an organ failing, how could love and logic ever be enough?  You can't love a person enough to cure their heart disease or convince a liver to work properly by telling it all the reasons why we love it and want it to work properly.  She needs medical treatment, but we are sadly still very much in the dark ages when it comes to treating the brain.  Please try to forgive her if her brain can't see how much you guys love her and how much she needs treatment, just as you'd forgive her breasts for getting cancer or her intestines for having colitis.  She's not choosing this.

And please do take care of yourself.  The scary thing is that all the love in the world may not save your wife.  Your child desperately needs you to be healthy, to be emotionally available, and to be dependable.  I'm rooting for you so much.[/quote]

[b]It sounds like you haven't been the primary caretaker of someone with mental illness. [/b] This is different than organ failure or heart disease.

The disease itself drives them to refuse treatment, actively rail against it, or grasp at their caretakers to "fix" them.  But end of the day, OP, you need to realize the ONLY person who can really help your wife, who can really make her better, is herself.  She has to do the work, she has to embrace the treatment; and lots of mental health treatment feels hokey and silly (which is partly why many very smart people with depression have such a difficult time with the therapies).

Your job is to love her, and tell her you want to be there with her to get better, and you have to just wait and see if she will make progress.  But always be mindful that you can't cure her, and to look out for the well being of your child and yourself as she tackles her demons.[/quote]

You are dead wrong there.  I have been the primary caretaker of my mother nearly my whole life.  I was the closest thing to a caretaker that my brother had as well.

There's actually very little in your retort that in any way contradicts what I said.  If love and logic could cure a brain illness, most of us wouldn't have them.  As you said, it's often a symptom of the illness itself that makes people refuse treatment.  It's not truly a CHOICE...not a conscious, willful one, because the same person at another time in their life when the disease is NOT symptomatic would often make an entirely different choice.  In the 2700+ days that my brother lived without a full manic episode before his last one, he fully grasped the need to manage the behaviors that could lead to a trigger of aanic episode and was fully supportive of the need to go back on lithium should he destabilize.  We talked of it often.  But then circumstances in his life (his wife's PPD/paychosis) for which she refused treatment, the birth of his second child, led to him losing major sleep over a sustained period, causing full blown mania.  And once his brain went haywire like that, there was NO rational thought or fully voluntary choice in his decision making.  It was out of his control.

What is illusory is the sense that the person is really capable of choosing the right thing.  So yes, I agree that aentally
Ill person typically must be the one to choose to get better.  But the nature of the illness is that particular organ is that they often will not make that choice, because their brain isnt working well enough to choose it.  And it makes as much sense to say a person should choose for their kidneys to work if they are failing.  A person's willpower and intention are not necessarily any more successful at choosing to fix their own brain illnesses as they are at choosing to fix their kidneys.  Luckily some mental illness is mild and a person retains enough rationality to make treatment choices that help.  But that's not always within a patient's control.

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