southernhybrid
Contributor
I'd like to first that I admire you for staying with your very sick wife all this time. It takes a strong, dedicated person to do that. Secondly, I think you made the best decision considering the very undesirable choices that you were given by this difficult situation you were faced with.
I'm not a moral absolutist and I'm not even sure that we have much in the way of free will, so I'm quite astonished that some would use that argument to criticize your decision. I am a professional nurse with over forty years of experience, and many of my former and present patients suffer from many different types and degrees of mental illness. I prefer the term "brain diseases," because we now know thanks to modern technology that there is evidence from brain scans and MRIs that with these diseases, the brain is actually impaired just like the heart is impaired when one has heart disease. People that suffer from psychosis, that often includes a wide variety of delusions are not capable of making their own decisions when it comes to many things. It's extremely common for people that suffer from bipolar disorder, especially if they are manic and delusional to reject their medications. I've seen this countless times and the outcome made by these decisions always exacerbate the disease, sometimes resulting in hospitalization. You were obviously between a rock and hard place when it came to what to do about your wife's illness.
While I blame no one here for their lack of experience in this field, I do think allowing your wife to become homeless would have been cruel. She may not have survived very long as a victim of homelessness and it certainly would have had a negative impact on the emotional well being of your children. While I understand your frustration, you made the right choice by not allowing that outcome.
There are times when we must do things that may have seemed morally wrong in another situation. You did what you had to do in order to preserve your family and your wife's health. There really was no other thing you could have done that would have resulted in a better outcome. My father was bipolar although he never suffered from psychosis, his illness was always a challenge for my mother and his children.
Let me share a story that happened to me many years ago, when I had to tell a little lie to get a patient help. I had a sweet little patient that rarely ever left her room and spent most of her day in a hospital bed. One day when I was visiting her ( I was her home health nurse ), I realized she had been experiencing hallucinations and delusions. She lived with a sister who was in her 90s, so she couldn't do much to help. It happened well over 30 years ago, so I don't remember exactly what I told her, but I do remember promising her I was merely sending her out for an evaluation at a local private mental health hospital. I knew damn well that this hospital would not keep a dependent lady with open wounds and a indwelling catheter, but I had to get her help so I told her what I needed to in order for her to get help. As I expected, she ended up in the state mental ward after an evaluation. Then one day, I got a phone call at work. It was my patient, who had called me from her hospital bed to thank me for sending her to the hospital. Apparently, she was now lucid but realized she had been heading toward a psychotic breakdown. I was delighted at her progress and happily surprised that she wanted to thank me for doing something I knew she would have never agreed to at the time.
Let me add that I hope you and your family will continue to grow more unified and that your wife will be easier to persuade in the future if she stops taking her medications or if her medications aren't working and she needs an assessment and med. adjustment. This has been an interesting discussion. I hope you feel good about your decision. You made the correct decision. I'd go as far as to say it was the only morally correct thing you could have done at the time.
I'm not a moral absolutist and I'm not even sure that we have much in the way of free will, so I'm quite astonished that some would use that argument to criticize your decision. I am a professional nurse with over forty years of experience, and many of my former and present patients suffer from many different types and degrees of mental illness. I prefer the term "brain diseases," because we now know thanks to modern technology that there is evidence from brain scans and MRIs that with these diseases, the brain is actually impaired just like the heart is impaired when one has heart disease. People that suffer from psychosis, that often includes a wide variety of delusions are not capable of making their own decisions when it comes to many things. It's extremely common for people that suffer from bipolar disorder, especially if they are manic and delusional to reject their medications. I've seen this countless times and the outcome made by these decisions always exacerbate the disease, sometimes resulting in hospitalization. You were obviously between a rock and hard place when it came to what to do about your wife's illness.
While I blame no one here for their lack of experience in this field, I do think allowing your wife to become homeless would have been cruel. She may not have survived very long as a victim of homelessness and it certainly would have had a negative impact on the emotional well being of your children. While I understand your frustration, you made the right choice by not allowing that outcome.
There are times when we must do things that may have seemed morally wrong in another situation. You did what you had to do in order to preserve your family and your wife's health. There really was no other thing you could have done that would have resulted in a better outcome. My father was bipolar although he never suffered from psychosis, his illness was always a challenge for my mother and his children.
Let me share a story that happened to me many years ago, when I had to tell a little lie to get a patient help. I had a sweet little patient that rarely ever left her room and spent most of her day in a hospital bed. One day when I was visiting her ( I was her home health nurse ), I realized she had been experiencing hallucinations and delusions. She lived with a sister who was in her 90s, so she couldn't do much to help. It happened well over 30 years ago, so I don't remember exactly what I told her, but I do remember promising her I was merely sending her out for an evaluation at a local private mental health hospital. I knew damn well that this hospital would not keep a dependent lady with open wounds and a indwelling catheter, but I had to get her help so I told her what I needed to in order for her to get help. As I expected, she ended up in the state mental ward after an evaluation. Then one day, I got a phone call at work. It was my patient, who had called me from her hospital bed to thank me for sending her to the hospital. Apparently, she was now lucid but realized she had been heading toward a psychotic breakdown. I was delighted at her progress and happily surprised that she wanted to thank me for doing something I knew she would have never agreed to at the time.
Let me add that I hope you and your family will continue to grow more unified and that your wife will be easier to persuade in the future if she stops taking her medications or if her medications aren't working and she needs an assessment and med. adjustment. This has been an interesting discussion. I hope you feel good about your decision. You made the correct decision. I'd go as far as to say it was the only morally correct thing you could have done at the time.
