BPDFamily.com

Has anyone here ever had or experienced having counseling and meds as part of the conditions for divorce?

My wife has been diagnosed with BPD. Until this point, she has basically refused therapy. She will get initial help and then stop all together-meds,psychiatry,psychology. Agreeing to a divorce under these circumstances make me very wary because I would be entering into the legal system with a mentally ill person in a fight with real legal consequences. Can therapy and medication be included as a condition in the divorce? Or would it be left up to some third party to decide the course of action? Despite the external diagnosis, would some type of evaluator need to make an assessment? I've read about mental health evaluations being done that seem to judge whether someone is stable enough for custody but it never really speaks the continuation of therapy. Thoughts?

The old folklore may apply here... .You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.

So if you have an order that requires therapy, then what?  (Our general observation is that for a person to really improve, the person has to accept (end Denial) that changes are needed and then apply real changes to thinking and behaviors.)  If there is some improvement, maybe enough to make her look good (or less bad) to the evaluators in order to get some parenting benefit but then relapses into worse parenting again, does what she regained go away again?

In general, relatively few of us have had a diagnosis, so we had to rely our cases almost entirely on the poor behaviors.  Having a diagnosis is good but may be of limited benefit.  It all depends on how it reflects the impact on her parenting.  For example, if she was diagnosed as an alcoholic, that wouldn't automatically impact her parenting.  Maybe she is a dry alcoholic, having stopped drinking. Then the impact on the children would be minimal.  But if she were drinking and driving with the children or getting falling down drunk there parenting would be substantively impacted.  See why a diagnosis alone is not the deciding factor?  It helps you but her behaviors would be a factor too.

Hi Concerns,

I had a few (relatively ineffective) conditions that came up during my protracted custody battle.

The first was no drinking before or during visitation. Clearly violated, and no real way to enforce it.

The second was a condition to seek anger management, psychiatric evaluation with a forensic psychiatrist, and substance abuse treatment and counseling. Failure to comply mean terminating visitation.

N/BPDx chose to not even try, he just got mad and blamed me for ruining his relationship with S14, and pretty much disappeared.

The tricky thing with divorce/custody and court orders is that you are the person who has to enforce the boundaries. If you were not successful enforcing those boundaries in the marriage, you will probably find the same thing happens during divorce.

The only thing I was able to do in my court hearings was to introduce consequences for failure to comply. If necessary, I would then entail court to apply the consequences, like taking away visitation or giving me full custody.