Hi everyone, it's been a few months now. I wanted to come back and post an update for anyone googling "wife psychosis" and its many variants in an attempt to find peoples' stories and anything else that might be helpful. I also feel I "owe it" to those who helped me when I came here hat in hand, coming once with a question and no follow up seems a bit rude :)
I will check this thread periodically, so if anyone in need stumbles upon it and wants to ask me anything, sign up and ask away. Would also love it if anyone more experienced had any tips or general comments for me.
I'll talk about meds first, then the condition and life generally. Probably over a couple of posts, this may be long :)
There have been ups and downs, and I've come to accept that the next year or more is going to be very challenging. Medication was a real turning point. She was prescribed a low dose back in September. My understanding of an initial GP prescription is low dose + common medication first, to test for negative side effects, then adjust the dose as needed. One of our real blessings here is that she responded very well to the test dose, well enough that we decided against increasing it. She decided to stop taking it once, but that only lasted a couple of days before she started taking it again. This was fairly early on, when her condition was more unpredictable. About a month after that, she genuinely forgot to take it one night. Aside from these two instances, she's been taking the same dose once a night since September.
Medication has taken the severity away from her condition and helped her to sleep consistently, but has also affected her personality. She dosen't appear to feel joy and is very, very calm - almost TOO calm. One interesting thing - the night she forgot to take it, what looked like some paranoia came back the next day - but so did her 'personality' if that makes sense. We had a small argument over something silly, and after I pointed out how silly it was, she remembered she forgot to take it the night before. This level of self awareness was a big turning point in my opinion and a sign that she was starting to see this as a 'condition' rather than 'something that is happening to me'.
More to follow...