Question
I'm a 46 year old married woman and am at the end of my tether with my husband. He suffers from depression but is in total denial. My family are grown up and have left home. My husband no longer works and lies in bed most of the day, or sits around the house. He has been to some of the top specialists in the country, medication has been tried, and he was even hospitalised. He is now in bad shape physically too.
He refuses point blank to go for counselling and gets very upset if I try to force the issue. I have threatened to leave him and he says he will kill himself if I do. This has been going on for years, but is a lot worse in the last while. I have my own opinions on the source of his depression, but they are my opinions and not relevant as he has to be able to see it for himself. I work and take care of the bills, shopping, housework etc with no help from my husband.
I miss companionship, love and physical contact, none of which I get from him. It wasn't always like this. I don't want it to be like this. I don't know what else to do. I am trapped. I live in an isolated area and don't have many friends. I can't stay in this unbearable situation, but don't know what to do. I have been to counselling and support groups, but I can't spend the rest of my life like this.
Answer
I am trying to tread carefully here as I know this is a very hard situation to handle, emotionally, socially and morally. For it raises fundamental questions about the extent of personal responsibility for a partner, the nature of love, and the boundary between duty and self-care. And I have to tell you now that I haven't got the answers. I can raise some of the issues for you, and hope it will help.
When your husband says he'll kill himself if you leave him he's emotionally blackmailing you. Such emotional blackmail is no basis for marriage. Which brings us to a tricky question: Does depression mean a man is no longer responsible for his actions? Can you treat him like an adult, and refuse to be blackmailed? Or is he so 'sick' in his mind that the ordinary rules of behaviour don't apply?
Your husband has obviously left you in most senses of the word. No love, no touch, no companionship and no help with money or housework or ordinary worries. Has he done so because he's outside the realm of normality due to his depression? Which is back to the question of whether he is 'sick' - or mad as we would have said in the days before political correctness. Or has he made a choice, based on his own unhappiness, to opt out?
There are several dilemmas here. If your husband is sick, or out of his mind in some way, has he a right to make decisions such as the refusal to see a therapist? Can he be seen as capable of making such decisions? If not, why is he sitting at home instead of being treated? But if he is capable of making decisions, then why would you accept the emotional blackmail - his statement that he'll kill himself if you go? Because that is then a statement about a choice he would make as a man who may be depressed, but is definitely not out of his mind.
The point I'm making is that at many levels your husband currently has it both ways. Or put, perhaps more fairly, you're left shadow-boxing, operating in the absence of any clear-cut reality. Because of depression he can't love you, or help you, or work, or live his life. But at the same time he's allowed make the choice not to get professional help. That's not really on is it?
Dependency is a complicated story. It is possible that your very competence and loyalty and devotion are allowing your husband to stay stuck. I don't mean this nastily. Nor am I suggesting that it is a conscious thought process on his part. But the fact that your husband has you, allows him the unhappy and life-force-denying opportunity to live in depression.
It is, of course, also possible that he would, indeed, just opt out of life if you were gone. But what does that mean? Why is he staying alive? Is your presence his only reason for living? And isn't it very selfish, if true, to make you the sole reason for his existence when he gives you effectively nothing in return? What, exactly, are his thought-processes? How does he justify holding onto you when you're so sad and lost?
You do see, don't you, that you need to make a decision for yourself about the state of your husband's mind. Can you talk to him as a reasonable human being? Or is he so far gone that he needs serious medical intervention. One of the first steps, therefore, is to seek serious professional help. You need to hear what the doctors make of your husband's depression. Only then will you be able to see clearly enough to make the right decisions for you.
