When Love Goes Wrong 2: Psychotic or Delusional Disorders

 

Psychotic or delusional disorders can manifest in two basic ways:

Morbid jealousy (also known as Othello Syndrome) is when a person holds a strong delusional belief that their spouse or sexual partner is being unfaithful in the absence of any actual evidence.

Jealousy is a very common emotion, but when jealousy is entirely baseless then it can become pathological in nature. This can range along a spectrum between essentially normal feelings of jealousy, perhaps arising from an individual’s basic sense of insecurity or personal inadequacy, through to full blown psychotic illness.

Morbid jealousy is likely to take the form of constantly checking what the person’s partner is doing at any time of the day. The person may look on their partner’s mobile phone to see who they’ve been ringing or texting. They may interrogate them during the evening about what they’ve been doing, who they’ve been talking to.

This can be obsessional, but essentially non-psychotic in nature and therefore amenable to treatment, in which case, a talking therapy such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, can be effective in tackling and addressing the individual’s personal insecurities and anxieties. However, if it is truly delusional in nature, then it can be much more difficult to treat. It can also extend into stalking behaviour.

De Clerambault’s Syndrome (also known as erotomania) is a delusional belief that the person is in love with another, and that that love is reciprocated. This seems to occur most commonly in women. Usually, the subject of the person’s attention is only a casual acquaintance, and the affection is entirely unreciprocated. This belief can also lead to stalking behaviour.

I knew Sian for over 10 years. She provides an interesting illustration of both these disorders. Sian was in her late 20’s when she came to the attention of psychiatric services. She has first assessed in the court cells 12 years previously, having been arrested for harassment of her ex-husband and his partner. Although this assessment was inconclusive, there were a dozen further incidents of harassment over the next 6 months.

Things finally came to a head when she was arrested after being found hiding in the wardrobe of her ex-husband’s bedroom, having broken into his house. She was arrested on suspicion of burglary, and assessed by a psychiatrist in police cells, who recommended an assessment under Sec.35 MHA. Following this assessment, she was detained in hospital from Court under Sec.37.

I first became involved with Sian when she appealed to the Hospital Managers against her detention. It is a comparatively little known aspect of the Mental Health Act that, although a patient cannot appeal to a Tribunal against Sec.37 in the first 6 months of detention, they do have the right to appeal to the Managers of the hospital, who can, if they wish, discharge the patient.

I had to provide a social circumstances report and appear at the Hearing. This is when I discovered her story.

Sian had led a completely normal life until her late 20’s. She was married and they had one daughter. After a few years of marriage she became more and more suspicious of her husband, coming to believe that he was having an affair. She began to check his whereabouts, ringing him up constantly to find out what he was doing and where he was, and searching through his clothes and belongings. This behaviour began to put increasing strain on their marriage. In an effort to make him jealous and win back his affection, Sian had a brief affair with a friend of her husband. This only succeeded in finally ending the marriage.

On an impulse, Sian left the matrimonial home, leaving her daughter in the care of her husband. Her husband applied for residence, which was granted. After a year or so, her husband obtained a divorce and his new partner moved in. This provoked the increasingly abusive and violent attacks by Sian which eventually resulted in her being arrested, and spending a week or so on remand in prison until she was admitted to hospital.

When I interviewed Sian, she was still wearing her wedding ring, even though they had been divorced for a year and her ex-husband was now engaged to his new partner. She denied that it was possible that their relationship was over, and could not believe that her ex-husband could be having an intimate relationship. They were just friends, and Sian was certain that if she could cause a rift between him and his fiancée, then he would return to her. These beliefs were completely unshakeable.

Sian was not discharged by the Managers, and remained in hospital for about 4 months, during which time she was treated with antipsychotic medication and appeared to make a reasonable recovery, gradually realising that it was futile to believe that she and her ex-husband could ever get back together again. She was discharged from hospital with the rather vague diagnosis of “delusional disorder”.

Over the next few years Sian seemed to manage fairly well, getting a flat, and a job as a shop assistant, although she had a tendency to avoid contact with her care coordinator, and at times stopped taking her medication. At such times, she would become delusional again, invariably believing that someone she had served once or twice in the shop was in fact in love with her. She would then start stalking him, finding out where he lived and staking out his house. It was usually possible to persuade her to restart her medication, and these beliefs would then evaporate.

Sian’s most recent admission to hospital came out of the blue. She had been engaging well with the CMHT, was clearly taking her medication, and I had begun to explore with her some of the issues from her past. She had enduring guilt about abandoning her daughter, as she saw it, and I began to analyse her history and the breakdown of her relationship with her husband, in the context of the insidious onset of a psychotic illness over which she had no control. She seemed to have good insight into this, and it appeared to be reassuring her.

Then suddenly, over the course of two weeks, Sian began to behave increasingly bizarrely. She threw out all her clothes, resigned from her job, destroyed all her identity documents, and declared to her daughter, who was now an adult, that a man she had met in a pub a few days previously was her soul mate and one true love. She presented as highly distressed, agitated and tearful, with pressure of speech. Her daughter called out the Crisis Team, as it was at the weekend, and they assessed her and admitted her informally.

After her admission, I spoke to her daughter and discovered that Sian had only met this man twice, and only in the company of others, and that he had no romantic interest in her.

It took several months for her to return to normality, but eventually she was able to recognise that this wonderful, perfect relationship was entirely delusional.

When Love Goes Wrong 1: Adjustment Disorders

Love can sometimes give rise to bizarre and irrational behaviour. Indeed, it has been argued that since the definition of a delusion “is a sustained belief that cannot be justified by reason”, then being “in love” with someone could itself be regarded as a delusional state.

There are a number of well defined psychiatric conditions that could be said to arise from, or are manifested as, love and issues with relationships. Some of them are sudden and intense but fleeting, while others may be persistent, insidious and difficult to resolve. Either way, they can present as acute psychiatric emergencies requiring formal assessment under the Mental Health Act.

I would divide these disorders roughly into two types: adjustment disorders, and delusional or psychotic states. Today I’ll look at adjustment disorders.

A good definition of an adjustment disorder is “an emotional and behavioural reaction that develops within 3 months of a life stress, and which is stronger or greater than what would be expected for the type of event that occurred”. This can frequently be precipitated by the ending of a relationship, and in my experience, seems to occur more commonly among men.

Anybody can feel upset, bereft, or even suicidal when a loved one wants to end their relationship. Most people can fairly quickly accommodate and adjust to it, but some people have extreme and bizarre reactions, or develop a complete refusal to accept the reality of the situation. Here are a few examples from my professional experience.

Carl worked on a pig farm. One day he went to the local police station in a state of agitation and distress, saying that he had killed his wife. The body could be found on the farm, buried in a heap of pig slurry. He said he’d been clearing the slurry when his wife’s body had emerged. Although he had no memory of it, he concluded that he must have killed her.

The police immediately investigated, searching through tons of pig manure, but did not find the body of Carl’s wife, or indeed of anyone else.

They did manage to find out what happened. She was safe and well, having left Carl a few weeks previously and gone to live somewhere else in the country. Nothing untoward had happened between them.

It was as if Carl found the idea of his wife being dead more bearable than the fact that she had left him. When Carl was confronted with this, he began to recall what had actually happened, and his distress gradually abated over the next couple of days.

Colin had been married for 15 years. One day, his wife unexpectedly told him that she did no longer loved him and wanted to leave. He went off to work as usual, but when he returned home in the evening, he was shocked to find teenage children in the house whom he did not recognise. He also did not recognise his wife. He demanded to know what they had done with his young wife and infant children.

His wife called the on call GP who sedated him.

I saw Colin with his wife the following morning. The crisis was over by then. It appeared that his brain’s response to the news of the end of their relationship had been to develop a form of hysterical amnesia, where he had “lost” the previous 10 or so years, taking him back to a golden past in which he and his wife had young children and a happy marriage.

Overnight, the amnesia had worn off, and he was reluctantly beginning to accept the reality of the situation.

Chris presented to the A&E department one day with global amnesia. He did not know his name, or where he lived. He had no memory of his past. He was unable to give any information about himself.

He was examined for head trauma, but he had no injuries of any sort, and was admitted to a psychiatric ward.

After a couple of days a police trawl of missing persons revealed who he actually was, and his mother visited him on the ward. He did not recognise her.

Over a period of about two weeks, his memory gradually returned, and the story of what had actually happened emerged. And guess what? It was all about the ending of a relationship. His girlfriend had told him she wanted to finish with him. His immediate reaction was one of rage, and he had literally picked his girlfriend up off the ground and hurled her across the room. Fortunately, she was shaken, but not otherwise physically harmed. He then stormed off – and promptly wiped everything from his mind, including his entire life history.

These three cases featured forms of amnesia as a way of coping with intolerable news. Other people will simply refuse to accept that anything has changed, and will attempt to carry on despite all evidence to the contrary.

I was asked to assess Charles by his GP. Charles was a man in his 40’s who had been married for about 20 years. The couple had two teenage sons. 3 or 4 months previously his wife had told him that she wanted a divorce. She asked him to leave, but he refused. Since then, he had been living in the dining room. He had put locks on the inside of the door and only left the room in the middle of the night when the rest of the family were in bed. Then he would creep out and use the kitchen to prepare food for himself.

His wife had initiated formal divorce proceedings and had decided to put the house on the market. When she told him about this, he vacated the dining room one night and moved into the garage.

I went out to try and see him. His wife let me in and showed me photographs of the dining room that she had taken after he had vacated it. He had constructed a network of tunnels using cardboard boxes and blankets that had filled the room.

I went out to the garage, which had an up and over door which was closed. A car was in the garage, and he appeared to be living in that. There then followed one of my more unusual attempts to interview “in a suitable manner”. I could not induce him to open the door so that I could talk with him face to face, and had to make do with talking to him through the door.

During the interview I was unable to elicit any overt signs of psychosis, and he generally answered questions rationally, although avoided any discussion of the impending divorce. I concluded that despite the unusual circumstances, there was no evidence of risk that would merit obtaining a magistrate’s warrant under Sec.135. He was simply in denial, and unprepared to accept reality.

I advised his wife to get legal advice about evicting him from the property, and subsequently heard that after a few weeks he left of his own volition.

None of the above were actually detained under the MHA. In other cases, precipitated by rejection and the end of a relationship, people can self harm or become suicidal and present with high levels of risk. But do they actually have a mental disorder that makes them liable to be detained?

In the case of most adjustment disorders, the acute response will quickly resolve, or the absence of serious risk factors do not merit use of the MHA.