[pd65]

I just want to share my experience with the hope of finding others who can relate. I am a married man with two young children and my wife is an alcohol dependant with diagnosed severe brain damage and alcohol induced dementia. I’m in my 50s and she’s late forties. We both work but I’m part time and do all the childcare. She was off work and in a bad way for a year but found a job and rallied again. This Christmas she seems worse than ever. Physically weak and wobbly, depressed and not eating. Erratic, often confused, very very difficult to be around. Manipulative, nasty, extreme mood swings. I worry there are safeguarding issues around the children. I can’t write this without imagining that the reader would find reason to think I’m exaggerating or self pitying but it’s impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t been here what living with someone with these problems is like. A friend of mine looked after his wife with early onset dementia for fifteen years and I saw at first hand how impossible it was. I can’t leave her because she needs help and I can’t leave the kids, I’m the prime carer. I can’t afford it anyway. I’m terrified she is killing herself slowly and that our beautiful children will be deprived of their mother and one day know that she took her own life. I can’t help her, I’ve tried and tried and it only makes it worse. She is a survivor of child abuse and trauma and has issues with control and neglect that cause her to reject all help and throw love and compassion back in people’s face. Especially mine. Getting help via doctor or mental health inevitably leads to involvement from social services and I’m afraid they do not take well to men closely involved with family mental health and alcohol issues. I found them to have great authority but without competence or wisdom. I have no idea what to do but this situation cannot continue. The atmosphere at Christmas was awful and I’m so sad for the kids. Has anybody been in this sort of situation?

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