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Mental Health Issues

dbsojo's picture

After some thinking and researching, I have realized that there is something desperately wrong with BM. Perhaps she is not evil after all. I have found a personality disorder that seems to fit all of the problems we have been having. My question is how to bring mental health issues up in court without seeming like we're pointing fingers. From the research I've done, SS is not necissarily in harm's immediate way, but her behavior definitly ties into the complaints we're going back to court for. Is there a civil way to do this (so that she actually gots some help, or is it better left alone?

tiff's picture

to bring it up in court, unless you are there for war. We will be bringing up mental health issues and have in the past- however you have to have the judge order psychiatric evals and that may mean you and dh have to take one too if the bm protests and wants it done on u too. Also to claim mental health problems you also usually have to have a psychiatric professional to testify in court for you- and have mental health treatment records supeoned- which can be very costly. Just speaking from personal experience with our case. Maybe you can talk to her about it civially but I don't know if she would handle it well or not- it depends what type of person she is. otherwise like I said be prepared for war- we won but like i said it was a long, horrible fight and there was nothing civil about it- I'm sorry you have to go through this though - I know its hard for all involoved

dbsojo's picture

Well, Mic and I are pretty mentally sound, short of the stress we are under from this. I'm sure we wouldn't have any trouble going through evaluations ourselves. I've been looking at NPD, and I say the child should not be in harm's immediate way because as of right now, he is the perfect child. He gets straight A's in school, he's good at sports, and all the girls in the 1st-3rd grades have crushes on him. He has learned, from his past punishments at home, not to misbehave. These punishments were questionable at best, but he's not scared of them now because he doesn't do anything to misbehave. My thought is, however, that this can only last for so long. I am worried that when he hits teenagedom (which is still a few years away), that he will rebel and that she won't be able to handle it. So long as he is perfect, he should be relatively safe.

I know that she has had treatment for seizures. It just came to light the other day, however, that she was on meds for bi-polar at one time, apparently confiding to Mic's dad that she was on a certain perscription. We do not know what it was, or if she is still on it. But there seem to be records that could potentially be subpeoned. There is no talking to her from my end. She hates me for absolutly no reason, unless she actually has NPD, in which case she has many reasons. Mic is to the point where he cannot talk to her, either. Anytime you tell her anything about the way she behaves, she hangs up the phone and denies phone visitation. She retaliates anytime you tell her she is anything less than perfect. What I am trying to look into is having her (or all of us) psychologically evaluated. I'm sure that if any mental health professional spent 10 minutes with her they would recommend that she get treatment. The child is already scheduled for a psych evaluation due to her recent behavior. We don't want to declare her unfit or anything like that (unless she is absolutly too sick to have custody of the child), but she needs help, and we are pretty sure that she will not get it on her own. She hurts her child out of hatred for his father more days that not out of the week, for weeks in a row. We don't want to open up a can of worms if she is simply being really, really immature, but this seems to go beyond immaturity and hatred. She doesn't realize that even though it hurts Mic to go a week at a time without talking to his kid, it hurts the kid worse. No matter how many times you tell her she's hurting her kid, she doesn't care. It was my thought to let the child have his evaluation, and hopefully the judge will order hers on account of his, without us even saying anything (which would be a real possibility if SS is honest about what's been going on in his). But she's brainwashed SS into usurping authority in the past, and I fear that she will intimidate him into shutting down during the interview. He only tells us about past abuse on the premise that it will not be discussed with her, and this is stuff that happened over a year ago. I have a hard time seeing him open up to someone he doesn't know, particularly if she tells him lies ahead of time. Depending on what is ordered after the evaluation, she may get a real good idea of what he says just based on the order, and I'm pretty sure she would turn on him afterwards. She just needs help, whether she has NPD or not. We doubt she will get it on her own. We are not-so-concerned about her parenting now, but we are very concerned about the future, particularly if she has NPD.