I have a friend whom I met almost 30 years ago. We have not had a relationship all those years, but on and off. Now, continuously on for over at least 5 years and we met up once in 2018: I was visiting Midwest, where she now lives (I live in California and she and I met in Texas), and she drove quite a distance to meet with me. I was shocked at how emaciated she was.

From all appearances, she has paranoid schizophrenia. She has a very elaborate set of beliefs about technology and scheming people interfering with her body. I am FB-friends with her brother, who is still in Texas, and he and other family members have pretty much given up trying to convince her to see a doctor. Her daughter, who is educated in the field of psychology, took her to a hospital many years ago and I think it was against the mother's will, but nothing positive ensued.

I have told her brother that I would try talking to her because I thought that I, a person who takes antipsychotics, albeit for bipolar and not schizophrenia, would not be perceived with such fear and negativity as her psychiatrically well relatives. I did not succeed. She gets skittish at a mere mention of psychiatric treatment. So I gave up.

She is very lonely and isolated and I have a lot of friends and I sympathize with her plight and want to be supportive. Plus, she is not always voicing her various delusions, and sometimes I see a glimpse of my old friend the way she was back then, and I cherish that.

The problem is that when she calls me and I listen to everything she says without contradicting any of her beliefs, she gets extremely talkative–imagine a soliloquy of a person who gets more and more excited. Then I stop her by saying I have to go do something. She does not get offended, but I wonder if there is a better way. The thing is, I DO want to talk with her, but I would rather see more of those glimpses of my old friend as she had been before she became ill. I do not want to listen to a monologue about how her Facebook posts (lengthy posts that nobody ever reads) were read by some ill-meaning groups out there who later caused pain in her limbs (she has untreated arthritis, untreated because she would not go see a doctor since she believes that the pain is inflicted by bad actors and technology, and she would not take medication).

Has anyone dealt with such a situation and is there a way to bring out "the old, the prior, the well" person more and put a lid on florid delusions? Again, I am not trying to convince her to go into treatment, I realize that it is futile, but I want to hear more of the person I used to know and less of a manifestation of a system of paranoid beliefs.