What to do about Delusional State

[lindaura3]

Hello,

I am only just beginning to understand the parameters of BPD - which are quite wide, but do fit the situation with my daughter, who has only recently been diagnosed, although I can see that she has been suffering from this for many years.

I am going to cut to the chase here, for my most difficult challenge is my daughters continued delusional state.  She refuses to take her anti-psychotic medication (although she lies about this constantly - claiming she is taking it, but it does no good) and really, only when she is in a delusional state does she admit to not taking it for some reason.

Anyway, her delusion makes her a figure of torment and persecution by powerful others, who only want to torment her.  Sometimes I am in league in them in her torture, and sometimes I am also an innocent victim.

She is not always in a delusional state, but she slips into it in the blink of an eye, with no visible trigger. When she is in it, it becomes her reality and it is as if she was never out of it.

If she feels I am a willing participant in her mental torture (in her mind, she receives constant death threats, threats to her kitten, physical and sexual abuse, publication of disgusting descriptions of her on the internet, etc) then she can become quite violent towards me.

She is 37 years old now, but has been physically ill with Lyme Disease, as well as a hereditary blood disease, her entire life, so it was hard to see the mental problems as they occurred, because the physical problems were so dramatic.  Only now, do I see the seeds of them there even when she was a teenager.

Like most of you with daughters, she is very beautiful and very intelligent, which was also a problem, because she could lie so convincingly and also is so well read and entirely self educated.

Sadly, because she had no formal education because of her physical illness, she now feels worthless and inferior to people with degrees and careers, something she could not have because of her Lyme Disease.

Okay, my cutting to the chase didn't work.  What I meant to ask is this:

Because her delusional states come on with such suddenness, and because she can attack me physically and has nearly killed me once, I have had to move her into a separate apartment where she is alone except for her kitten (thank god I got that for her).  Sometimes, she begs me to stay with her overnight and I always have to say no.  I feel terrible about this.

She does not believe there is anything wrong with her. she does not agree with any mental illness diagnosis. In her delusion, the therapist and psychiatrist are just participants in a charade created for her benefit.

I have learned never to question the delusion.  It is now totally part of her memory as if it were as real as your own memories.

Does anyone else have a child with such delusions?

Is there any hope of recovery?

Thank you,

struggling

Our objective is to better understand the struggles our child faces and to learn the skills to improve our relationship and provide a supportive environment and also improve on our own emotional responses, attitudes and effectiveness as a family leaders

[Kwamina]

Hi lindaura3  

I still remember your first post on here. The situation with your daughter is very complex, how are you doing now?

I see that you have already found your way to the parenting board. I would advise you to also post your question about the delusional state of your daughter on the parenting board, I think you'll get a better response there: Parenting board

Take care and I believe the senior members on the parenting board will be able to relate to your situation and share their own insights with you.

[jellibeans]

Dear  lindaura3

I have asked that your post be moved to the parenting board but until then I just wanted to welcome you.

Is you r dd getting any help? Does she see a P? Seems to me the is more going on here than just BPD. I am not sure she is stable enough to live on her own when she can't be trusted to take her meds. Has there ever been a time when she did take her meds and you saw improvement?

Can you tell me how her lyme disease impacting her health?

Just trying to get more details about your situation... . hang in there

[maxen]

hi lindaura3 and i join the others in saying 

you are in such a stressful state and i'm so sorry for your situation. it does have me concerned. i hope you've looked at the Safety First link that Rapt Reader gave you on your intro thread. but i also have a question: has your daughter certainly been diagnosed with BPD? that diagnosis does cover a wide area, but my mother has delusional disorder (paranoia) but not BPD, and what you're describing sounds very familiar to me. you are wise not to question her delusions (and wise also to have her living apart from you) but if your daughter has DD (though she may unfortunately suffer with both DD and BPD), there may be different approaches. there are medications that can modify the effects of DD.

please keep posting lindaura, this is a very supportive community!

[hopeangel]

I am also so sorry for your suffering.

My dd suffers delusions fairly often when she is ill!

I was of the understanding this was to be expected, but is that not the case? Without her antipsychotic meds we are in big trouble, I have not been attacked physically for some time but used to be on occasion before she was found to be ill and was unmedicated.

Lindaura - your story sounds familiar to me but I am now concerned there may be other illness here as well as BPD?  I know it was thought when she was first in hospital that dd had schitzophrenia however BPD is the description that fits her like a glove.

Are other pwBPD not suffering from delusions?  Is this something more than that if delusions are involved? My daughter constantly thinks her neighbour can hear her thoughts and is responding to them and she thinks I put the phone on loudspeaker to laugh at her, she used to think I published things about her in the local paper.  She is obsessed that i and others are laughing at her.

Is this not just BPD?

[foggydew]

Your description of your daughter sounds very much like my stepson, who was diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia. He was excellent at not taking his medication, even if you were standing over him watching while he appeared to take it. Without it he was psychotic. He was able to have a depot injection occasionally, which gave him considerable stability. However, in the bad phases, he could change rapidly within seconds to someone suffering from real delusions... I was going to poison him, everyone else wished him evil, he was the son of god and M ary talkd to him ... he attacked his mother in such a state and she refused to live with him. My husband (his father) and I tried to take him in but had to make him choose between taking his medication and staying with us or leaving. He left.

He had to live in a home as it wasn't possible to live with him normally - and this certainly gave him semi-friendships and he was not lonely. Experts told us that the intensity of the attacks would decrease as he grew older - unfortunately his 'voices' won. I only got to know him from the age of 16, but 'something' had been there from avery early age. He was 28 when he died.

His was a very extreme case and there are many people who do not suffer as badly. Although he was difficult to live with, he benifitted from living together with others in a similar situation. It also took a lot of the pressure off us, and we were able to have a more normal life. Are there no mental health experts who can support you?

[co.jo]

Those delusions can also be part of bipolar illness, it sounds like more than bPD to me. What was her diagnosis when she was prescribed the anti-psychotic meds?

[lindaura3]

Hello and thank you all for your comments.

It is true that my daughter's situation has been quite complex and it has been difficult to get a diagnosis.  She left two hospitalisations, each 2 months long, with no diagnosis - just the working diagnosis of Bi-Polar. 

It has not helped that she refused to accept any diagnosis -and usually accuses me of having BPD, along with the rest of my family.

It has only been the last 6 months, that the psychiatrist and her therapist have decided that it is BPD. If they have told my daughter this, it would make her furious.

Actually, it was about 6 months ago that my sister, with whom my daughter and I stayed last year in the USA while seeking medical treatment, sent me a link to a BPD site, which I read with interest.

The diagnosis seems to fit, pretty much as Hopeangel says, like a glove. 

My daughter sees everything in black and white, she loves or she hates you, she is impulsive, quick to anger, has risky behaviour, pulls out her hair, her mood swings are monumental and instantaneous, she has rejected all her old friends and is therefore alone except for me, stress brings on crisis and the only thing different from the rest, except for hopeangel, is the Delusional thinking, which her doctor's think is part of her extreme case and which seems to be tied into everything - like it is with Hopeangel.

Only since I joined this site and read the PDF for families by John G. Gunderson, M.D. and Cynthia Berkowitz, M.D. as well as watching the video about delusional thinking from Amador (I think that's his name) have I had any tools to deal with my daughter.

Sadly, none of the psychiatrists or my daughter's therapists have ever given me any helpful advice.

In fact, In New York City, after she was discharged from Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Hospital too soon, because the young social worker thought she was fine (fooled totally by her beauty and brains), and she went crazy in the flat he found for her and terrorised the neighbours) the doctors advised me to just leave my daughter on the street! As they expected to get her back anyway. I said, "to be raped or murdered? to fall in front of a subway train? Whose crazy here?"

I managed to get my daughter back to England, and a Greek friend gave me an apartment to stay in in Athens, because she thought the lifestyle here would be healthier for my daughter.

One reason I stayed in Athens, is because the Psychiatric system is family oriented.  It would never occur to them to send the mother away and leave the child, even an adult child like mine, to fend for herself.  It is the only place that my daughter has accepted therapy, although I do not think it is helping at all, but it does give her someone else to talk to besides me.

My daughter and I have shared a lot, over her lifetime, because of her Lyme disease.  She was housebound most of her life, but she is self educated and  we could go to concerts and the theatre when she was well enough, we read enormous amounts of world literature, and much that she read alone, she would tell me about, so that I have benefited greatly from knowing her.  She is so brilliant.

It took me a long time to commit her to hospital, because I did not want to injure her beautiful mind.  I am afraid I have, but she was in such terror of her persecutors, I had to.

Lastly, I want to say that I can see, when I look into her past as a child and a teenager, that the seeds were there.  The black and white thinking, the refusal to accept personal responsibility for anything. Nothing was ever her fault.  It always amazed my husband and I, because she was never punished for anything, that she refused to accept blame, even if we saw her, for instance, drop a glass, It was never her that broke it.

Anyway, it is a heartbreaking situation, but I feel I am being helped already by this site.

thank you,

Lindaura

[hopeangel]

Lindaura I think my dd is the same ie prone to delusions as part of the whole BPD illness.

The thing with mine is that when she is badly unwell it is really heartbreakingly terrible BUT, and this keeps me hopeful, she goes through phases of wellness and sometimes we can get on very well - as long as i am on top of my own reactions and apply all the tools I have learned both here and in books.  I am holding on to hope that there can be improvements for us all!

This illness can drag us to hell and back but I REFUSE to give up hope, I just will not do it, I suppose Im hoping that, if i keep on with my tools and dd has periods of improvement then maybe those 'well' times could all join up and become recovery!

We need these dreams for their future, I think and also you never know what is round the corner with medical breakthroughs there could be more hope than we know of in the next decade!

I was worried then when I thought it wasn't just BPD, not because it changes anything - its just that I need to KNOW about what's wrong, for some reason it feels a bit less 'out of control' if I know about it and can learn how to help. It does make you feel so helpless!

I really feel for you lindaura and pray your dd has a better time coming very soon.