Normally I'd put this in the Wednesday wellness thread but I'm in a bit of a crisis here so I figured I'd crowdsource some wisdom from the Motte. My wife is bipolar and also a bit of an alcoholic. For most of the ten years we've been together, her drinking has been in the gray zone of "probably drinks a little more than she should." When she drinks past a certain point, she tends to get real mean. Anyway, over the past several weeks it seems like both her mood and her drinking have gotten worse. On Sunday evening she had a full-on drunken meltdown, screaming at me, expressing suicidal ideation, etc. She slept all day monday, then woke me up at 3AM Tuesday morning, drunk again, and again expressing what seemed to me like suicidal ideation. I had to go to work so after she finally went to sleep around 830 AM, I wrote her a long note confronting the issue. I get home and she basically refuses to talk to me. I should mention that most of the conversations are happening over text because we have a small child and also an in-home nurse who helps with childcare. I text that if she doesn't want to talk about it, I'm going to get a hotel once we get our child down so I can clear my head. Anyway, I've finished putting the child down for the night, I come out, and her care is gone. Nurse doesn't know where she went and it doesn't look like she's getting my texts. What do I do? Call the cops? Seek a psychiatric hold? I don't really know, it feels like the situation is escalating way faster than I can deal with it and my attempts to address the problem are only making things worse.
EDIT: I got a hold of her on the phone and she was sober, rational, and promised not to do anything "irreversible" (my word). She said she'd be back in time for me to go to work. I agree that long-term changes will need to be made - its what I've been pushing for - and I think its more likely that she'll accept that if I give her a modicum of space to process than having it forced on her, however tempting that possibility. I don't have any texts to show the cops (she didn't really respond to any of my texts so it would only show a one-sided conversation) and I suspect my City PD will other priorities than trying to track down her car over a quite wide possible search area. So I am going to take a calculated risk and take her at her word. Thank you to everyone who responded. I will try to follow up in a day or two here for everyone who took the time to help.
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Notes -
Mod hat on:
As general advice, it's a bad idea to post on the front page if you need people to see it immediately. It'll be stuck in the filter by default until a mod allows it through, which we don't see (the post shows up for us, we have to specifically check the filtered list). You're lucky I checked right now.
Also, I would personally excuse this post on the grounds of emergency, but I do not know if the other mods would, at least on general principle. This is not a new standard I'm setting on behalf of everyone else.
Mod hat off:
I'm going to write a reply as a normal user. It seems serious.
Edit:
In hindsight, I should have written the second comment first. I'm tired and barely thinking straight after being up all night studying. Thankfully it cost all of 30 seconds, so I won't lose much sleep over it. Consider this an apology nonetheless. My priorities were out of wack.
Also, for anyone else in a genuine emergency, probably post in the CWR thread too. More likely to be seen by someone, hopefully someone who can help. I don't care, personally, if it's not actual CWR material, at least if it's a real emergency.
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