Hello. I just found this support group while looking online for answers in how to handle a current situation. My mom was diagnosed as bipolar seven years ago, though I believe it's been an issue for much longer. She's never accepted her diagnosis and has spent the last seven years in various doctors' offices and hospitals convinced that it must be "a real illness." 

On Nov. 9, my parents came over (I live an hour away from them) for a doctor’s appointment that my mom had with her psych doctor. That evening I was meeting them for dinner, but they managed to get lost forgetting where I live. I didn’t think anything of it at first. I just told them to find a parking lot and that I would come find them. Once I met them, I discovered my mom in a manic episode. She was very combative and was refusing to have dinner with my dad and I. I convinced him to take her to the hospital to be evaluated.

After a lot of difficulty to get her inside, triage was a nightmare. The nurse asked her if she wanted to harm herself, to which she answered yes and that she was going to hang herself with a rope. They then asked if she wanted to harm anyone else. Her list included the president, my dad and myself. After a long and exhausting night in the ER, they sedated her to get her to sleep and she was admitted. She was there for 11 days, all of which were a rollercoaster. The day of her discharge, her doctors wanted to transfer her over to the inpatient mental health facility to continue her treatment under evaluation until she evened out. However, she refused so she was discharged. I did not feel comfortable with that, but I went along to her discharge and she went home with my dad.

During that time, my dad’s symptoms of dementia seemed to be exaggerated. He forgot much of the details of the night we took her to the ER, and I became the middle man between her nurses and my dad, having to constantly remind him of the situation.

The Saturday before Thanksgiving, my mother called me and the first words out of her mouth were that when she saw me, she was going to strangle me with a rope. I didn’t even go home for Thanksgiving because this has just been a lot for me to handle. Since then, my mother’s behavior has continued to be erratic and combative. I’ve considered reaching out to her doctor to give an honest view of how she’s doing, but I hesitate because I don’t feel that it’s my place to do so.

This morning, my dad texted me that my mom was trying to get admitted to the inpatient mental health facility, but I didn’t hear anything else for awhile. Until about an hour ago when my mom called to bitch about my dad’s cognitive function and then put him on the phone, wanting me to talk to him — All while I’m at work because her concept of boundaries is non-existent. My dad’s PCP wants him to have a CAT scan of the brain to check for dementia, but he is refusing to do so because he says that if he does have dementia that he doesn’t want to know. I attempted to explain to him that there is treatment that helps to slow the progression, but he just kept saying that there’s no cure.

My mom is still convinced that there’s something wrong with her and that it’s not bipolar. She says she hasn’t been sleeping and a few other issues that she told me that mental illness can’t cause, when I know that it’s still signs of a manic phase. She then continued to say that mental illness doesn’t make you want to go to a bar and find someone to go home with. My mother has never talked like that, let alone saying it so nonchalantly to her child.

After I finally was able to get her off the phone, I told her that I’m not answering any more phone calls until after I’m home from work. Not only is this extremely stressful and emotionally challenging, it makes me feel extremely hopeless because I don’t know how to get to any solution in this situation.