Should you, can you, be angry, abandon this person in order to save yourself and other family members?
The option would have been nice. Abandonment carries the risk of criminal charges where I live.
We went through experienced, professional, round the clock carers like most people go through their clean knicker drawer.
We tried a specialised, live in home. Within a week they insisted that on top of their fees we paid for an extra dedicated carer just for her. Three months later they booted her because their staff turnover had gone through the roof and families were withdrawing their relatives (in much the same diagnostic boat as MIL) because MIL was making other residents' lives miserable and visiting time had become a war zone.
So that left us. On our own. In our own home because after the last rental experience, with all the having to face the furious residents of all the other flats, our rather isolated farmhouse with few neighbours to annoy was deemed the only realistic choice.
24/7 in home care. And it really was 24. She could go days without sleeping. Just dozing here and there for 15 minutes, between violent, furious, vicious outbursts.
And the law thought it was right, just and acceptable to arm twist us into that existence. All while leaving us exposed to SS, because our child was living in a high tension home where his parents were being frequently, physically abused
If DH could have abandoned her to the state without legal ramifications would it have happened ?
In theory. Yes. Absolutely.
But he couldn't abandon her, and I could not abandon him.
Aside from the fact that I love my husband, I had to juggle the risks for my son. Stay and risk the negative outcomes for my kid caused by a limited (by age + self destruction catching up physically) period of intense instability and high tension. Or leave and risk the high potential of him being "that kid", the one whose father was in the news for killing his poor, old, ill mother and then committing the terrible sin of suicide.
I chose the former. On the basis that when there are no good choices, take the least awful and do everything you can (thank you to my few, but very kind neighbours) to protect squirto from hearing/seeing the worst of it.
My child has been left with an unusually strong reaction to a raised voice. Which is not great news for an Italian. But a lot better than it could have been. I hate that I had to play Russian roulette with him as the stake. I don't feel like we "won" the gamble. But I'm grateful for all the other bullets dodged. I owe my neighbours a shit ton. Their good will stood in place of the state, between my child and more significant damage, because the state would only ever intervene, with pointed fingers, when repercussions were too late to undo.
When we talk of abandonment it seems such a simple, black and white choice. With an obvious right answer.
We were legally deprived of a genuine choice. And maybe it was all the furious pushing against the legislation that bound me in place that makes me believe that, given an alternative, I would have made DH walk away. But perhaps those with the legal option to walk away are just as tightly restrained. Not by law, but by the black/white, public perception of abandonment, as outlined above ?
Years on MHI forums for families and carers did not convinced me that the quality and availability of services and resources is all that better anywhere else. Nor did it convince me that, save for me and DH, some higher power is picking out people destined to cope with ill relatives based on their evident ability to do so. If not some actual superpower that makes them extra resiliant and special "not sleep needing" people. Likewise I learned that the situation did not have to rise to the extremes of MIL's condition for the emotional, mental and physical outcomes to be much the same.
In terms of abandonment, perhaps there needs to be a recalibration that has a more nuanced vision of whose wellbeing can be factored in as an equal priority. MIL was ill from a very early age. She was exorcised frequently. Subjected to horrendous, useless, humiliating and painful "treatments" at a time when psychiatry was barbaric. Her family held all the power, she had none. Her family's feelings, needs and beliefs were paramount. Hers were irrelevant. They were seen as fully fledged humans. To all intents and purposes, she was seen as "sub". It is a very very very very good thing this is no longer the case.
But... we cannot go so far in the other direction that we forget that the people around the mental ill person are humans in their own right. And just as entitled to their dignity, autonomy and a voice in deciding what their personal limitations are/are not.
If it is considered morally wrong (quite rightly IMO) to strip a mentally ill person of the above (via the law, or public opinion), then so too it must be wrong to strip people of those elements because of their relationship with a mentally ill person. Either those things matter, or they do not. While many places do not strip family members of them via the law, a great many places appear to do so by framing providing care and oversight as a black and white choice, made by villains and heroes.
I have no issue with the word abandon being used. But I think there needs to be some readjustment in terms of introducing shades of grey into the current understanding of what is the obviously right, and obviously wrong choice to make when abandonment is on the table and starts to look increasingly attractive.
Or
The varied peoples of the world can rise up and howl (plus throwing things at them if it will help) at governments far and wide for the shitty shitty job they have been doing for decades in terms of MH provision, all of them stripping away funding to the point that "resources and services" are more gaping, black hole than safety net.
One of things that still sticks in my craw is the frequency with which the average member of the public would become (naturally enough, given the circs) outraged, or scared enough to yell at me for "not DOING something".
When deprived of sleep, the impulsivity aspect of my ADHD had a field day. It was not unknown towards the end for me to yell back "I might be able to if YOU LOT DID SOMETHING instead of accepting cuts to the bone in mental health care" (which often came out garbled cos my second language is not fab when I'm stressed and knackered, but at least I knew what I meant.)
But maybe I shouldn't have it in my craw. Until MIL came into my life, I just assumed that if an illness got bad enough, if the symptoms caused behaviour extreme enough to cause distress, "the system" dropped neatly into place to pick up the slack. Maybe without the bells and whistles that it should have (cos, cuts), but in terms of the basics, it would be there. It took five years of looking askance (and thinking we were being picked on and left out for some obscure reason) before I finally accepted that "the system" I was looking to to save her and us, was a figment of my imagination.
Given that, kind of daft of me to think that your average person could possibly know, or comprehend just how alone you are when MHI strikes.
How could they know that the sinking and swimming is more about spluttery dumb luck (or lack thereof), than judgement and asking for help in a timely fashion.
No wonder they judge us and find us sorely wanting. In many cases I think they genuinely believe that given the circumstances "somebody is doing something" and we are just not nice people, making an Everest Replica out of a molehill. Trying to shirk the few responsibilities we ourselves have decided to take on, as is right and proper.