Hi, I'm new.

I don't know if this is even the right place to post this, but if not, I hope someone will direct me to the right place.

My partner is severely depressed. She suffers from chronic pain issues and she has migraines. When her migraines hit, they mess with her head and she acts and sounds like she is drunk.

When I first met her, she was abusing prescription medication, self medicating. She quit that several years ago, but when she is having a migraine, she acts the same way she did when she was high. Extremely agitated, slurring her words, poor judgement, etc.

This behavior triggers me. When she was using, I didn't realize it, and she blamed migraines, so I dealt with it until I became depressed and started to suffer from PTSD. Eventually, I figured out that her problem was the meds. Now, when she starts to act drunk, I react as if she has taken something and it's really ugly.

She sees a neurologist who diagnosed her with depression and confirmed that her head being messed up is because of her migraines. That doesn't help me, though, in terms of my reactions.

Ok. So as I write this, she is in the middle of an episode, and I am so angry and depressed I want to hit something. She is accusatory and agitated. She says self depreciating things and makes it clear that I am the one who is making her feel that way, even though I am sitting here doing nothing. I'm trying not to talk to her and she is poking at me (verbally) trying to engage me. I don't even know how to explain it. She is slurring her words so badly that I can hardly understand what she is saying, while she talks to me sarcastically, as if she is trying to get a reaction out of me. She will say something and I will answer with a simple "yes or no" and she will jump on me like I argued with her. It's awful and it is making me want to crawl under the covers and hide. It's like being a caretaker to a mean toddler who had the authority to make their own decisions.

To make it worse, we have a 9 year old and I am stressed to the max worried about how this is affecting him

The flip side to all of this is that when she is fine, she is perfect. Functions completely normal. Cries and apologizes for her behavior and actions. Talks about all the things she will do to make it better. But then the depression/migraine hits and the cycle starts all over.

We are both in therapy, separate and together.

My questions are this: can the drunk behavior be a symptom of depression? How do I deal with all of this without losing myself more than I have? Does anyone else deal with this? Anything I should be doing, can do to make it better.

I am sorry if this sounds incoherent. I am tearing my hair out and trying really hard, at this very moment, not to turn and engage her in a fight, because that's what I normally do and it never ends up well.

Help?