My sister-in-law divorced a few years back. As luck would have it she also developed another medical issue to add to things like moderate cholesterol elevation, mild diabetic as well as depression over the divorce. I don't recall what it is at the moment. While one can sort of wrap their head the concept of divorce, this one was also mitigated by the discovery that not only had my brother-in-law fathered another child a number of years back but was also boning a younger woman. Now, my BIL was also in the Air Force Reserves. That requires scheduled monthly weekends away from home as well as an extended time away once a year. My son & I used to always joke with each other that we can be sure Uncle R. won't be there for family get togethers (we had lots when all the kids were younger) and instead will be off to the reserves. Turned out that part of the discovery was that a lot of the time, there wasn't any Reserve scheduled. He would use that as an excuse to shack up with a variety of women.
So, she took a variety of pills to help her deal with her medical issues both physical and mental. But pills can have interactions that affect both and that requires some balancing and even alternate medications. Eventually, she had the right mix if you will. This is not necessarily an easy process when you've got a couple of different doctors, specialists, who don't communicate well with each other and may be ignorant of certain drug interactions.
Well she got better and then since she was no longer feeling depressed, she decided on her own to stop taking the medications that treated it. While this didn't make her violent, she became delusional. She'd become obsessed with bugs and dust claiming her house was overrun. Exterminators were called in but found nothing. She would also arbitrarily stop taking some of the other medications. Then maybe restart certain ones. Her body became totally unbalanced and she began to lose weight precipitously. It affected her ability to work as a schoolteacher. Fortunately, summer was coming and school would be out.
I took a couple of weeks off and my wife drove her sister to our home where she stayed. This was so that I could monitor her pill taking and supervise doctor visits and hospital tests. Gradually she got better and this time substantially so probably because now there was greater doctor-doctor communication and being the prick that I am, I was not intimidated by their medical degrees. It's been over a year now and she's been great. No more worries about bugs. She put weight back on and is looking to teach a course part time at a college for non-english speaking people. She was over this past Thanksgiving, along with both of her adult children, and even joked about the bugs and dust thing!
I say all this Jaimie to let you know that your situation is not unique and more folks than you may know also have their lives affected. My gut take is that it requires more than one person - you - to help see this kind of thing through. IMO, having the benefit of family (her children, sisters, etc.) is pretty beneficial in seeing these sort of matters through. So is having both a healthy respect as well as certain amount of contempt for the medical profession. There's a lot of doctors just going through the ropes and you've got to beat on them sometimes to get them to actually work together rather than being superficial. Best of luck to you.
