Why It Was So Hard to Love a Man With Mental Illness
By: Elle Silver
Tags: Mental Health, Relationships, Family, Self, Mental Illness

Why It Was So Hard to Love a Man With Mental Illness

As my husband’s mental state worsened, so did mine.

Photo by Gabriela Pereira from Pexels

My husband’s fist came down hard and fast on the box of juice packs sitting on the dining-room table. I’d purchased the juice earlier in the day but had yet to move the box to its proper cupboard in the kitchen.

Under the force of his fist, the cardboard crumpled and purple liquid squirted out the sides. I watched in shock as juice spilled to the beige carpet below.

I rushed for paper towels to sop up the mess. The rug didn’t wait for me. It absorbed the juice as if it were drinking it.

My husband didn’t stick around to help me to clean up his mess either. He stormed out of the room, leaving me alone to deal with it.

I didn’t call him back to help. I was tired of arguing. I didn’t know if he was capable of helping me anyway.

His mental state had been in a slow decline over the past couple of years. After we lost everything in the Great Recession of 2008, he became a conspiracy theorist. He believed 9–11 was an inside job, every mass shooting was a hoax, chemtrails were real, and the Apollo mission never landed on the moon. Aliens lived in secret underground tunnels in New Mexico.

Today’s conspiracy assertion was that he now believed the moon was a hollow structure, built by ancient aliens. Worse, our government was hiding this from the public.

I refused to believe this claim, so my husband became angry. Down came his fist on the box of juice packs. When he hit the box, I felt like he’d hit me, too. I felt like that box — crumpled and battered.

My self-esteem was the juice dripping off the table, absorbing into the carpet, disappearing. Each day my husband’s mental health worsened, so did mine.

I still loved him. But every time he said something crazy or did something like smash a box of juice packs with his fist, leaving me to clean up the mess alone, a little bit more of my love drained away.

This is the story of my husband’s mental breakdown. His breakdown not only destroyed our marriage but threatened to destroy me, too.

My husband’s close-knit family tried to help him.

As my husband’s behavior became increasingly erratic, his whole family got involved. We had many family gatherings where his parents, his siblings, and I got together to try to come up with solutions for him.

His father had been in high-level corporate management before he retired. He had plenty of actionable advice for my husband. They’d spend a day writing up a plan, and my husband would come home, feeling excited about getting his life back on track.

Reality would set in. Carrying out the plan was too difficult. For one, it entailed waking up early. The plan required my husband to get up, sit at a desk, make lists of new companies where he could apply, and make phone calls. But instead, my husband would sleep in. When he did finally get up, his mind was foggy. He felt too tired to work.

Tomorrow he’d get to it. Tomorrow would come and he’d use the same excuse.

At one of our family meetings, one of my father-in-law’s colleagues sat in. This colleague also suggested a plan of action to get a new job. Again my husband dropped the ball.

His parents then paid for him to meet with a life coach, but again he never followed through.

It was always the same old story — his conspiracy obsession won over his desire to fix his life.

To fix our life.

My husband put our children in danger.

Obviously, my husband’s mental state couldn’t help but start to affect our kids. One afternoon, I received a phone call from a teacher at our children’s preschool to notify me that when my husband went to pick them up, he’d driven off without buckling them into their car seats.

Now you might ask why I would even let him drive with our children at that point, given his struggles. When you’re living in this situation, sometimes it’s hard to realize just how bad things are until something like this happens. My husband would still have moments of lucidity that would make it seem like he was getting better. I was also in denial of just how bad his condition was.

To make matters worse, I’d started working part-time again, so I needed him to pick up the kids from preschool while I was busy at work. In fact, the teacher called me right as I was speeding down the freeway, en route to my new job. She said that our children were not only not in their car seats when their father drove off, but our three-year-old was standing in the front seat.

I realized this teacher didn’t have to call me. She could have called Social Services straight away. She told me that if it happened again, she would.

My mind filled with visions of losing custody of our children — or worse, one or both of them dying in a car accident because of my husband.

I had a presentation to give at my new job that day. It took all I had to concentrate on what I was saying.

Maybe at this point, you’d think I would have left my husband.

I didn’t. I stayed.

I didn’t feel strong enough to leave — even though I should have.

I kept telling myself we’d get through this. My husband would get better. He’d start manning up to be the great dad our kids deserved. He’d go back to being a good husband again. He’d shelve his conspiracy habit. We’d fall back in love.

None of this happened.

And still, I stayed hopeful — and practical. I wasn’t earning enough at my part-time job to support two children. My husband wasn’t working. He didn’t have money to pay child support. I had no experience with welfare. I didn’t know where to go, how to get government aid.

In retrospect, I should have researched more. I didn’t.

I had no idea how bad things would get.

He left us to go to an “alternative” space conference, and I lost all sympathy.

A month later, my husband announced that he would be gone for a few days. When I asked where he was going, he said he would be attending an alternative space conference.

At this conference, top speakers in the field of space conspiracies were lecturing about aliens and other things that NASA was hiding from the American people.

At this point, my husband no longer believed in Newtonian Physics. He believed that aliens flew around anti-gravity spaceships that could be seen in the night sky if you wore infrared glasses.

Not only was I angry that he was leaving us to attend this conference, but I was enraged because we were so low on money. He was wasting what little cash we still had in our bank account to pay for a hotel and entrance to this event.

To make matters worse, we only had one car that was drivable at the time. The second car kept overheating. Because it was too expensive to fix, we hadn’t dealt with the issue.

My husband refused to stay home even though I asked him to. He went to the conference, taking the good car. I used the car that kept overheating to drive the kids to a birthday party. Of course, on the way back, on the freeway, the car overheated. It was stupid to take the car, but I was angry and didn’t want our kids to miss out on a party because their father had decided to go to some crazy conspiracy conference.

While stopped on the side of the freeway, I waited for the car to cool down. Once it did, it wouldn’t start. I called a tow truck to tow the car to a mechanic. That’s when I also called my husband to tell him the news.

There I was, waiting on the side of the dirty L.A. freeway in the burning heat with our two children in the backseat, dozens of cars whizzing past us as we waited to be towed, and my husband related that he was relaxing in an air-conditioned hotel room, in between lectures.

This was the point of no return in my mind.

Not only was it going to cost a fortune to fix the car, but when we finally got home, I realized we had very little food in the refrigerator. It was a Friday and my husband wouldn’t be home until Monday afternoon. I couldn’t get to the store because I no longer had a car to drive. The children were too little to walk to the store with me. I couldn’t leave them alone while I walked there. My in-laws were out of town.

This was the day when I stopped loving my husband.

Does this make me a bad person? It felt like an awakening.

A marriage therapist told me I should just “accept” my husband as he was.

Still, I didn’t leave. I was too afraid. My husband started seeing a new life coach. I had high hopes for my husband’s recovery. The coach wanted me to be involved in the meetings, believing I was integral to his recovery. Of course, I went to the meeting.

During the meeting, the coach kept telling me everything was going to be okay. Anger suddenly overwhelmed me. Everything had not been okay for a very long time. I’d been living this nightmare for years. However, the coach still thought he could fix our marriage and referred us to a marriage therapist.

I’ll never forget the therapist asking me how I felt. I recited the laundry list of problems I had with my husband. The therapist told me I just had to accept my husband as he was.

That’s when I really lost it. I was ready to stop going to any more meetings when the life coach said I should at least see what happened when my husband started going to a new psychiatrist. The psychiatrist diagnosed my husband with schizophrenia. I was shocked. The doctor prescribed an antipsychotic. I hoped this would help.

The medication just made him feel spacy and more exhausted. Soon thereafter he stopped taking it.

He went to see another psychiatrist, who also diagnosed him with schizophrenia. Again I was stunned. This time my husband wouldn’t even fill the prescription. He continued to be obsessed with his conspiracy theories. And now my mental state was on the brink as well.

I left my husband — still, things got worse before they got better.

By this point, I was severely depressed. I was suffering from chronic pain and fatigue. I finally worked up the courage to leave. I’d been putting my own mental health on the back burner for years. Our children were miserable and failing in school. I had no choice. I had to take them out of this living situation.

I had to save myself.

Once I left him, my husband hit rock bottom.

Only after I left did life start to get better for my husband. But it had to get worse first. He got in seven car accidents in a year. During one of these car accidents, he hit a man who was walking across the street. He hadn’t been paying attention because he was still obsessed with his conspiracies. He shouldn’t have been driving at all.

He got a job on the floor of a hardware store but then got fired from it for falling asleep in his car during his break. I had no choice but to assume the vast majority of both the child care and the financial responsibility of parenting two kids.

But having left my husband, at least I could provide my children with a more stable living situation.

And at least I could start rebuilding my own life.

How we’re doing today.

Today my ex-husband is doing much better. He finally recovered and is much more mentally stable. He went back to school and now has a new career. He also stopped obsessing about conspiracy theories. He doesn’t believe in them anymore.

However, I don’t think he could have gotten to this point had I not left him. I had to leave and he had to hit rock bottom for his mental health to improve. As a result of separating from my husband, my own mental health bounced back as well.

The constant pain in my body has gone away. I have much more energy during the day. My kids are also happier because I’m happier.

Leaving my husband was the only answer for all of us.

Parting words.

While it’s important to try to help our loved ones when they’re suffering from mental illness —we have to remember that our mental health and happiness count, too. We can’t throw ourselves under the bus to rescue someone else. Sometimes they won’t get better until we let them hit rock bottom.

That means that sometimes we just have to stop helping them. We need to consider the health of the rest of the family.

Mental illness doesn’t just affect the person suffering from it, but everyone close to them — especially the spouse and the children.

I’m just glad my kids and I survived my husband’s mental breakdown.

As I slowly rebuild my life, I feel grateful that at least we’re all happy again, even if my marriage didn’t make it.