I shoudl start by saying she has had no diagnosis of dementia, nobody has even mentioned dementia (apart from me) but it's just ringing alarm bells.
That said, she has been generally depressed for a long time now (roughly a decade, during which she divorced FIL - unclear whether depression a symptom or a cause of the divorce but she's certainly been even less happy since the divorce, 7 years ago).
She has huge levels of paranoia about a lot of things - friendship issues etc, where she often accuses friends of upsetting her with what seem like fairly minor (if that) slights.
She has HUGE levels of paranoia about my family (ie DH's ILs) whom she has always loathed (The feeling unfortunately is mutual. So she's not paranoid that they don't like her, she is correct that they don't like her. It's just the manifestation of it in her that makes me call it 'paranoia' IYSWIM). She seems to genuinely believe that my family arrange social events with the sole intention of excluding her and that while at these social events they talk about her behind her back. Nothing could be further from the truth. My parents don't like her but I expect she crosses my mum's mind roughly once a year - she just isn't on her radar. They certainly have never mentioned her in my presence (I only know that they don't like her because of some fallout after our wedding years ago) and my mum would never say anything negative about her to me.
At Christmas my mum did in fact send her a gift (olive branch, sort of) but MIL has been going on and on to DH about what a meaningless gesture it was as there was no nice note.
She has recently 'accused' DH of 'spending too much time with them' (my family) and claimed that he has been talking about them a lot. Again, just not true - DH sees my family only once every 3 months and certainly hasn't been telling stories about spending time with them as he knows his mum has issues. Also though he gets on fine with my family, that's as far as it goes. They're his in-laws, he likes some aspects of them and finds others wearing, he certainly doesn't have a high old time when we do see them so he'd never be 'concealing' anything about the relationship from his mum.
When he told her all this in a recent conversation (DH said he felt as if she had ambushed him) he asked her to list the times he had been talking about my family. She wasn't able to come up with a single occasion. But she said even if it might be 'fantasy' he (DH) still has to take account of what she says as her 'feelings are real'.
DH is pretty robust with her, and has always been able to be, but he said it's impossible talking to her these days as she just makes things up and he can't tell how much of it she really believes or whether she's just depressed and looking to pick a fight.
She gets visibly agitated when DD talks about her cousins (on my family's side) and will say things that imply she thinks she is in some sort of competition with them (They are kids of 7 and 5)
Reecently she was also angry with her other son as well as DH because 'not enough fuss' was made about her on her birthday. (They arranged a family dinner which we all attended and nice presents were bought... when challenged on what the problem was she wasn't able to articulate it but just said she thought 'more fuss' should have been made).
She is VERY and increasingly aggressive with strangers whom she perceives to have been rude to her. This can be anything from not saying thank you when she holds a door (admittedly I find this annoying and always have!) to imagining that someone has deliberately bumped into her in the street when they have barely brushed her. She is incredibly intolerant of children and got very agitated about two small boys at a bus queue who were genuinely being nothing other than... er... small boys. Jumping up and down a bit, hopping around etc. She will very loudly and aggressively challenge people if she feels they have been rude or badly behaved. Or rather, passive-aggressively challenge them and then loudly bitch about them as she walks off. It got so bad at one point that DH and his brother tried to tell her she was going to get yelled back at or worse one day. But apparently 'everyone is rude' and so she stands her ground.
Sorry, this has been epic... what I am wondering is, if anyone has experience of the early signs of dementia, if this rings any bells. fwiw it is a big change of character, albeit a slow change, from when I first knew her.
She is just 70.
She is constantly in tears, constantly upset, she gets very obsessive about details, she is anxious.
'Just' depression/anxiety?
If something more (eg dementia) - what can or should we do? Thought of suggesting it is horrifying - she will be outraged/more paranoid than ever.
Any advice at all?
fwiw I love my MIL, she has generally been a great MIL, but it has been very hard not to take some of her nastiness and paranoia personally recently. She was also very bad around the point of our wedding a few years ago and DH inadvertently went NC for a while but she seemed to improve and they always in the past had a good enough relationship to work on it.
He is finding it very difficult - he has job stress and health stress - and he feels as if she is constantly creating drama where none exists.
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Worried about very paranoid and depressed MIL - anyone have experience of dementia?
DuchessOfWeaseltown · 27/02/2016 19:59
opioneers, that's really interesting what you say about your mother and rings so many bells.
tbf MIL wasn't at all a 'difficult' character when I first knew her and she was truly a great mum when DH was young, however she has always had the propensity to get extremely emotional/over-sensitive about things that don't bother most people.
However yes, like your mum she had a pretty rotten childhood. A very self-involved and possibly narcissistic mother and a father who (according to a drunken remark made by MIL's former best friend to DH one night, which he has tried to block out as it upset and shocked him so much) probably abused her sexually in some way. He died when she was only in her early teens.
She had (I think not terribly good) counselling about 15 years ago which very abruptly ended when her counsellor moved away. I suspect a lot of stuff was raked up and then not dealt with as the sessions just ended. Probably not a huge coincidence that she separated from FIL about a year later. He is fundamentally a good man but emotionally quite closed-off and I don't think he was at all capable of giving her the support she so seriously needed.
It's all very sad and depression is of course the obvious explanation. Even if so, it's getting to a point where I think she needs more help than she is able to get for herself.
It's really hard though when so much of it comes out as aggression and simple unreasonableness. DH and his brother both have very very busy and hectic professional lives and this last outburst from her came when she summoned them both by 'emergency' text on a weekeday lunchtime saying there was something vital she had to tell them and then she basically spent 90 minutes complaining about my family. DH knows he should have just got up and walked away but he has done that before and the grief it led to just didn't feel worth it. I don't think there are many mums (or dads!) though, who would think it is OK to get their adult kids to take almost 2 hours out of a working day just to have yet another hysterical rant about their son's in-laws... 
It does make it hard to continue to treat this whole thing sympathetically, I have to admit.
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