What would you say to a good friend whose father was diagnosed with schizophrenia and who didn’t take it well? As in, ‘I shall not marry, I shall not have kids [though I was not otherwise against it], I have until forty in my mind.’ And until forty she expects to mind her parents.
Depends on how old the friend is, and how prone she is to making dramatic declarations of that sort she doesn’t actually follow through on, and on her relationship to her parents.
In general—if she’s young (which from my current perch maps to mid-20s or so) and her relationship with her parents seems generally healthy, and she’s not prone to following through on ill-advised oaths purely for the sake of consistency, I would probably ignore all of that and encourage her to talk (to someone) about her feelings about her father and his diagnosis and her own mental health, and expect her to gradually come to some kind of peace with it.
If she’s older than that, or if she’s more compulsive about consistency, I might engage her on the relationships question more actively… why not marry, for example? If her concern is with her spouse having to care for her, etc., I’d probably open the conversation up a little into questions of informed consent and whether she feels that’s a situation people can choose to risk for themselves, and that sort of thing. If her concern is something else, I’d listen and try to decide whether it’s a fair concern, and act accordingly.
If her relationship with her parents is unhealthy, I’d probably focus on that first. Not sure what I’d say exactly, but I’d encourage her to talk about that relationship and what she expects from it and whether she endorses that, and if not how she might go about changing that relationship.
She’s almost 29, isn’t prone of declarations of the kind at all (one of those ironic people who don’t give much weight to others not giving much weight to what she said once), and hasn’t done anything truly inconsistent with the claim in the last 6-7 years. She has talked about this issue with her friends, though many of them are child-free based on other considerations and so might not have steel manned homemaking. Her mother, who was the one to diagnose her father, has taken her to see a psychiatrist, who prescribed some antidepressants, I think (she also has some stress at her job during that time).
I talked to her about informed consent, and she did not answer me explicitly, but I think her objections would be of the sort ‘people swear to help without any idea of what it entails, and since I have an idea through living with my parents, and do not wish to suffer through explaining it in sufficient detail, the honest thing is to not force others to choose.’
She’s also unlikely to start living separately, unless she does find a postdoc in another country.
(nods) Yeah, that’s tricky. I’d be tempted to ask how she would feel about a prenup that specified a forcible divorce if she was diagnosed, but that would mostly just be a joke in bad taste.
Maybe there are third-party sources of information she could point potential suitors to?
She might not find the joke in bad taste. I am not sure what youmean by third-party sources, though. She has a sister with a wildly different opinion on the matter (‘ah well, it’s not like anybody’s free from deleterious alleles, so my kid might obtain worse from my husband, but we still are going to have one’) and she knows marriage != procreation for many men, but… She’s still ‘morally obliged’ to stay with her parents until the end.
By third-party sources I mean, like, if the AMA or APA has a brochure entitled “So Your Spouse Is Schizophrenic… What Now?” Something that would provide potential suitors with the relevant facts without her having to explain it all (yet again).
She seems to be well aware of them, and I have her come over as often as she is able to. It’s just, I think this isn’t enough in the Quirrelmort sense of ‘enough’. The reason I ask this on LW is because we have a ‘conflict of interests’ - if she ‘defects’, the responsibility of minding her folks falls to me, meaning I might have not given it my best shot (even though I do think so.)
What would you say to a good friend whose father was diagnosed with schizophrenia and who didn’t take it well? As in, ‘I shall not marry, I shall not have kids [though I was not otherwise against it], I have until forty in my mind.’ And until forty she expects to mind her parents.
Depends on how old the friend is, and how prone she is to making dramatic declarations of that sort she doesn’t actually follow through on, and on her relationship to her parents.
In general—if she’s young (which from my current perch maps to mid-20s or so) and her relationship with her parents seems generally healthy, and she’s not prone to following through on ill-advised oaths purely for the sake of consistency, I would probably ignore all of that and encourage her to talk (to someone) about her feelings about her father and his diagnosis and her own mental health, and expect her to gradually come to some kind of peace with it.
If she’s older than that, or if she’s more compulsive about consistency, I might engage her on the relationships question more actively… why not marry, for example? If her concern is with her spouse having to care for her, etc., I’d probably open the conversation up a little into questions of informed consent and whether she feels that’s a situation people can choose to risk for themselves, and that sort of thing. If her concern is something else, I’d listen and try to decide whether it’s a fair concern, and act accordingly.
If her relationship with her parents is unhealthy, I’d probably focus on that first. Not sure what I’d say exactly, but I’d encourage her to talk about that relationship and what she expects from it and whether she endorses that, and if not how she might go about changing that relationship.
She’s almost 29, isn’t prone of declarations of the kind at all (one of those ironic people who don’t give much weight to others not giving much weight to what she said once), and hasn’t done anything truly inconsistent with the claim in the last 6-7 years. She has talked about this issue with her friends, though many of them are child-free based on other considerations and so might not have steel manned homemaking. Her mother, who was the one to diagnose her father, has taken her to see a psychiatrist, who prescribed some antidepressants, I think (she also has some stress at her job during that time).
I talked to her about informed consent, and she did not answer me explicitly, but I think her objections would be of the sort ‘people swear to help without any idea of what it entails, and since I have an idea through living with my parents, and do not wish to suffer through explaining it in sufficient detail, the honest thing is to not force others to choose.’
She’s also unlikely to start living separately, unless she does find a postdoc in another country.
(nods) Yeah, that’s tricky.
I’d be tempted to ask how she would feel about a prenup that specified a forcible divorce if she was diagnosed, but that would mostly just be a joke in bad taste.
Maybe there are third-party sources of information she could point potential suitors to?
She might not find the joke in bad taste. I am not sure what youmean by third-party sources, though. She has a sister with a wildly different opinion on the matter (‘ah well, it’s not like anybody’s free from deleterious alleles, so my kid might obtain worse from my husband, but we still are going to have one’) and she knows marriage != procreation for many men, but… She’s still ‘morally obliged’ to stay with her parents until the end.
By third-party sources I mean, like, if the AMA or APA has a brochure entitled “So Your Spouse Is Schizophrenic… What Now?” Something that would provide potential suitors with the relevant facts without her having to explain it all (yet again).
Thank you. I’ll look it up and talk to her. At worst, she’ll laugh.
It’s not so much “saying to” but providing the person a space to be clear about the assumptions that drive her thinking.
She seems to be well aware of them, and I have her come over as often as she is able to. It’s just, I think this isn’t enough in the Quirrelmort sense of ‘enough’. The reason I ask this on LW is because we have a ‘conflict of interests’ - if she ‘defects’, the responsibility of minding her folks falls to me, meaning I might have not given it my best shot (even though I do think so.)