A dear friend has been going through hell for the last 5 years as her husband (let's shorten that to TH) initially had severe depression including a lengthy stay in a private clinic which made life impossible for her and her 2 kids so she opted to leave which prompted 2 suicide attempts by TH, numerous hospital admissions and finally a voluntary stay in an NHS clinic for several months. During his time in the clinic, he suffered auditory and visual hallucinations and managed to hang himself and had to be rescuitated. With the right medication and lots of help from his friends (including daily visits from me) he recovered, was released, got a new girlfriend and it seemed like everything was moving forward.
However,just before Christmas this year, he was caught drink driving, lost his licence and lost his job which as you can imagine triggered a MASSIVE decline. At first, we were all incredibly supportive and were marching him through a sucession of GP / psych appointments but nothing worked. It has slowly deteriorated since then into a severe alcohol problem. A friend of a friend is a very sucessful recovering alcoholic so they were brought in to help and to try to hook him up with the right support but to no avail.
He hasn't answered his phone for months and on the few occassions when people have been able to see him at his house they have been appalled by the way he his living. However, as the 'main' problem is now alcoholism, the community mental health team have pretty much washed their hands of him.
The original reason for the post (just wanted to give a detailed history!) is that my friend is desperately trying to divorce him and everything had been agreed in writing with solicitors after many months before his recent decline. However, he had not signed the official court papers and judging by his current mental state, it does not look likely that will ever happen.
I went with her today for the first court hearing but obviously without him present it was a complete waste of time and the judge just adjourned for another 3 months.
I really can't see him making a miraculous recovery any time soon and to be brutally honest, it's likely to be his death that brings about any change.
Does anyone have any experience of this kind of situation and can offer any advice / signposts? Can the 5 year separation thing I've read about work here or is there anything else that she can use?
The judge mentioned getting a doctor to declare him as a 'protected person' or getting a 'litigenous friend' but the guy can't even wash himself so he's in no fit state to keep a doctor's appointment or sign any kind of legal document.
Sorry it's such a long post but wanted the full and very complicated story out there to start with x