For people saying , this is an emergency and they’d step in for any teen in this situation…from what OP has said this is not a one off. It is a chronic long term mental illness. This station is going to arise over and over again. The teen has already had his own mum abdicate responsibility and have dad ride in like the hero to “rescue” son form the mums “poor environment”, and then this same hero is expecting this convenient “surplus spouse” to pick up dealing with that situation.
i looked after my spouse, by choice, with mental illness for 20 years. It broke me as it does, if you read the statistics, in 50% of carer cases. Yep, 50% of people caring for someone with mental illness go on to develop mental health issues of their own.
dealing with someone with self harm or suicide ideation, or any other miriad of delusions or hallucinations or not like looking after scene with physical illness- and god know that is hard enough.
it already sounds like dad is on a road to mental health issues by agreeing to mum delegating parenteral duties, and believing sleeping in same room as his son is a long term success strategy. This is at best a very unwise strategy, and at worst will make dad ill, and divorced.
and the bottom line here is, neither parent has got far enough in pushing for mental health services. I know exactly how bad it is, before anyone lectures me. Exh with schizophrenia for 20 years taught me that. Care in the community is a fallacy. And crisis teams are a scarce resource. As for sectioning - stuff of unicorns. And if I hadn’t learnt enough from experience with exh, I now have a dad who’s ended up being sectioned due to dementia, and is still being dumped from one DOL unit under a 117 order to another. But, you have to fight . I sat in the head of mental health services office ant one point and refused to budge until a care plan was instigated thst actually met my exh needs . Sounds like parents are all too reliant on playing ping pong between themselves in trying to “fix” their son themselves and then giving up and passing the role like a baton when they exhaust themselves.
it is NOT sustainable they continue this way. Both parents need to be doing the carer role. They both need to be fighting in pursuing correctly support services. They should be working as a parenting team to ensure both get down time, and neither just dumps on other (as mum has) and then when that goes tits up starting to dump on the “surplus spouses “
I had to separate in the end from my exh and his illness to protect my own health and well-being. His illness changed the dynamics of our marriage. I did not love him as a husband, I was more like his mother, for years. I had all the appalling and selfish thoughts you get in that situation- resentment, loneliness, anger etc. To expect a step parent to be able to be more compassionate than that over years, for a child who is not biologically hers, and has a biologically father and mother, is naive and delusional.
Yes, all those that say they’d step in to do this for anyone. Sure, for one day and then you get to go home and distress, relax and have a goods night sleep. Or maybe you could manage a week knowing, at the end of that week you can get up and walk away. But this is 24/7 with no end. This teen has a chronic condition, that, with continuing lack of professional expert intervention, will probably, if anything, get worse before it gets better, you’re berating a women as a heartless bitch, by totally under-estimating what carers of mentally ill people go through.