[Ameline]

I live in a large house with my grandparents and my mother. My mum is a difficult person. She is very obviously mentally unwell, but insists she is OK and won't get treatment. She is prone to creating paranoid constructs in her head. Now she's convinced a crime happened within the house. It is very improbable and practically impossible for us to get into trouble even if it did. But she is convinced she will be fined a ridiculous sum of money and go homeless.

She's trying to make us to "cover it up", except there is nothing to cover up. The means she wants us to use are weirdly particular, illogical, expensive and demand a lot out of all of us, especially my granddad who is quite ill at the moment. She has absolutely no regard for anyone or anything else except her anxiety.

She is very insistent, talks about nothing else over and over no mater how much we try to talk her out of it - and she's also considering doing some things that would be very bad for the rest of us - she owns a small portion of the house. Generally there are things my grandparents do to appease her, but if anything, it encourages her to make more extravagant demands. I get it, they just want to make her stop. She will go on with blaming everyone, use emotional blackmail and sometimes threaten to make extreme decisions and such if she's denied anything. It is very emotionally draining. My grandma is especially affected. You just can tell, she got 10 years older in the past 6 months

We have no idea how to make her stop. This isn't even about making her feel OK (ish) anymore, we just need to stop her from doing something stupid. I just want to make her stop. She's hurting people, I don't know how she can't see it. She never did, she was always so single minded about the thing she was upset about...

[Skeezyks]

Hello Ameline: I'm sorry you & your family are struggling through such a difficult situation. I don't know as I have any real suggestions for you here. But I saw no one had replied to your post. So I thought I would.

Unfortunately, to my knowledge, there is no way to stop a person from doing the sorts of things your mum is doing. I don't know where you live. But my only thought here would be to contact whatever mental-health-related services / government agencies exist & see what options you might have, if any, for having your mum involuntarily treated / hospitalized. Depending on where you live, this may or may not even be a possibility.

A couple of days ago I read a post written by another member here on PC, who was in a similar sort of situation (dealing with a family member who is clearly mentally ill but who refuses treatment.) At the end of that member's post, she wrote that she was planning to contact the authorities where she lives & tell them her family member is threatening to harm herself. It's the only way any help can be accessed. That is certainly a desperate measure to take. But sometimes desperate situations require desperate measures. I wish you all well...