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JayJay28
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Mentally ill father - struggling to manage

Hello! I am a 28 year old female starting to feel the weight of father’s mental illness suffocating me.

 

My 63 year alcoholic (sober for 27 years) old father has major depressive disorder. As far as I am aware, this is his only diagnosis, although there’s a bit of ambiguity surrounding it. I suspect there is more going on due to his behaviour. He lives with my 88 year old grandparents. He has always been an ungracious housemate, constantly complaining about my grandparents and claiming that they make his life difficult. All the while he is disrespecting their requests to not smoke inside and being dirty and messy. He gets angry with them regularly; yells at them constantly. He calls my grandmother a bitch. He tells them that they’re going mental and that they are trying to control him. Simple questions are met with heavy sighs, cursing and storming around. “You’re f****ng deaf” “Get off my f****ng back” “You’re a nosy bitch” are common. My grandmother who is not one to talk about her feelings much, has started saying things like “I just don’t know what to do” “It would be good if he just hit one of us so we could just call the police” “It makes life barely worth living” 

 

Even if we can find housing for him, he is incapable of looking after himself. He can function and heat up a pie, but he is terrible with money. He gets the DSP and manages to spend it all within 24 hours. He then can’t afford tobacco, which my grandparents have to buy every day. Although they can technically say no, he will make their life even more of a living hell than it is now if he doesn’t get the tobacco. They want to say no, but they can’t say no. This costs them $700 a fortnight. I visited recently, and experienced first hand what he was like on pension day. He said he’d take me out for breakfast (I paid) and then we went into Target and he zoomed around grabbing things almost indiscriminately and put them in his basket. I tried to intervene but he was manically zooming around like a child and I was starting to get so upset that I had to leave. 

 

He recently booked a trip to the UK, where my brother lives. We all knew it was a bad idea and we tried to dissuade him from going, but nothing was going to stop him. He had no money saved up when he went and planned to get by with just his pension payments which he would receive two of whilst over there.He missed flights and many other similar issues.. My brother ended up spending $1200 on him, and me and my other two brothers contributed $500 between us, and my grandparents would have given him at least $500 as well over time, because he was calling them and demanding it. I felt like I couldn’t breathe the whole time he was over there. And now he’s talking about going overseas again this year. When I talk to my dad about his trip which caused us all great stress, he says of my brother “I think he really enjoyed having me there” which is one example of how delusional he really is

 

He is a pathological liar. I could list many different examples, but the most recent one which involved me personally was: He got an advance payment of $1300 from Centrelink and planned a beach trip to somewhere about 3 hours away  with it. He managed to spend all the money in two days and lost his bank card, and got stuck in another town. I had to book him into a motel and book a bus for him from that place back to our city, because the Greyhound ticket he had originally booked was to come back from somewhere else, not where he ended up. I spent $170 for all of this. I got a call saying he had missed the bus the next morning. I was luckily able to transfer his booking to the later bus. I called him half an hour before that bus to ensure he was at the bus stop, and he was like “nah I’m eating lunch, there’s no 4pm bus!” but I knew there was as I had organised the booking. I told him to get to the bus stop immediately. I then called him 5 minutes before the bus to check he was there and he told me he was. And then 10 minutes after departure time I called him to double check he had got on the bus and he ensured me he had, and that he was “sitting next to a nice french girl.” And then he texted me when he was due to arrive back to our city, and told me he was on a train home to where he lives with my grandparents. This whole time I’m updating my grandparents as he didn’t want to talk to them. When he hadn’t arrived home when they expected him, they gave him a call and it turned out he was still where he started!! He never got on the bus. He lied to me the whole time and weaved a big story. 

 

This is the first time he has done this to me, but apparently he has been doing this to my grandparents for many many years. 

we know we should stop giving him money, but he makes our grandparents life even more of a living hell than it already is if they don't. 

 

We don’t know what our options are. We are 99% certain he is not on the list for housing commission. We have tried to find out but we haven’t had any luck. Right now, my main concern is my grandparents. We just need him out of the house for their mental health. They are almost 90 - I want them to have a peaceful time in the last era of their life.  It’s overwhelming and I can feel my own brain becoming messy and stressed and I’m struggling to think straight in daily life. I need him out of their house and lives. I worry that this is my life now - having the constant burden and stress of a toxic and ungrateful father. That I can’t take job opportunities interstate because then my one brother who lives in Brisbane (the others live overseas) will be left with him. I guess I just want to know if there are any options I’m not aware of in this situation? Relationship Australia referred me to SLASS (getting my grandparents on board is another issue). Any suggestion of counselling for themselves would be met with unsureness, due to their generational mindset. In summary - how do I get my severely depressed and mentally ill father out of the house of my grandparents, when he can’t control his own money?  What he is doing is verging on being elder abuse in my opinion. I have given them the relevant phone numbers but they are yet to make the call as they are afraid of calling while he is around. 



2 REPLIES 2

Re: Mentally ill father - struggling to manage

@JayJay28  Hey JayJay28 and welcome to the forum. Sorry it couldnt be under better circumstances. This is my advice there is no way that your grandparents should be living under such circumstances. If they feel threatened by your father verbally they can call the police and the police will take him to a mental health unit at a hospital  to be assessed. It is intolerable that your father has the whole family dancing around him like this but then again the family are enabling his behaviour by giving him money etc. 

 

Hard loving sounds the right course of action. He is taking the whole family for a ride whether intentionally or due to mental illness (I think there is an undiagnosed mental illness). Regardless he should be out of your grandparents house and living on his own even if that is in a hostel until their is housing commission place available.

 

I hope I am not sounding too touch here but the situation cannot go on like this for everyones sake including your father. greenpeaxx

Re: Mentally ill father - struggling to manage

@JayJay28 ^^^^ tough

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