I (22F) am worried about my mom’s (55F) mental health and I’m not sure what to do. I probably noticed things getting bad about 2 years ago, but I had been away at college and didn’t see how truly bad it was until I moved home. I graduated in June, but moved home at the end of August because that’s when my lease was up. My brother (19M) has been living with her the whole time this has been going on. He says he’s felt alone for a long time. Before I go any further, I should probably mention that my parents have been divorced since 2010. Even before that, my mom did all the heavy lifting. My dad was not a good husband or father, and I understand that doing everything by yourself for so long can catch up to you.
About 2 years ago, I noticed the house wasn’t as clean as she usually had it when I was growing up. She never let the house stay messy for long, and even looking back at old photos where you could see our clean house in the background feels like a lifetime ago. I’m not going to pretend that I haven’t also contributed to this mess. In fact, all of the stuff I brought home from college has been sitting in the garage since I came home and it’s caused arguments between the three of us. I’m working on it. I’m decluttering my room and I have a storage unit but for now it’s kind of just all over the place.
My brother said at some point she also stopped cooking and just started door dashing for every meal. Since I’ve been home, she’s only cooked twice and both times were within the last couple weeks. I appreciate that she’s trying, but it’s still concerning. I’m not the greatest cook myself, but in college I cooked for myself a lot. Since she started door dashing, she stopped going to the grocery store. In fact, she recently left the house to run errands for the first time in a while the other day and I’m proud of her.
Earlier this year, she quit her job out of nowhere. I knew she hadn’t been happy there for like two years prior to leaving, but I never would have expected her to quit without having another job lined up first. She was a marketing director making a little under $250K annually, but she said it was mentally draining and just couldn’t take it anymore. At this time, I was still in school and the only reason I found out is because I tried to use her FSA card at the pharmacy and it declined. I called her to ask about it, and she admitted she quit about 2 weeks prior.
She asked me not to tell people, so I kept it pretty quiet. The only person I told was my best friend, and he thinks she was fired. I asked her, and she says she wasn’t, and that many people assumed she did. My brother said before she left, she would oversleep a lot and he’d have to wake her up in the morning sometimes. However, she was there for 11 years and could pretty much do whatever she wanted. She was the second employee hired when they were a start up, and even though getting fired isn’t totally impossible, it seems unlikely. She was a really valuable asset to the company, and she’s never been fired before.
They threw her a goodbye party, which they don’t do when they fire you. I interned at this company for 2 years when she worked there, and I saw the difference between people who quit and people who got fired. The reason my friend thinks she was fired is because she negotiated 6 months salary to live on. Idk the exact amount, but half of whatever she was making, plus her unused PTO and however much taken out for taxes. My guess is probably $30-40K but I’m not sure. My friend insists that this can only happen when you’re fired, but she was there so long that I could see this happening without that being the case.
She’s been living pretty comfortably, but at some point the money will run out and I want her to find a job soon. She can’t afford to retire, and even if she could, she’s not old enough. If for no other reason, I would like for her to get out of the house and do something. As a recent college graduate, I am also job hunting but it hasn’t been easy. My grandma (her mother) passed away about a month ago, and that has been understandably hard on her. I know that leading up to her death, it was difficult for my mom to watch her wither away and watch the dementia slowly start to take over. I don’t blame her for being upset about that, but things have been going down hill since before that.
She says she was waiting for her mother to pass away before looking for another job, and now that she has, she’s ready. This still worries me because of how bad the job market is. Even with her experience and impressive resume, the jobs she has found so far (and hasn’t even applied for) are way less than what she was making. She says that she can probably negotiate, but I’m not sure. Never in my life has my mom not had a job, and I still can’t believe it.
Another thing that worries me is that she spends a lot of time on the internet, social media, and having long, extensive conversations with her Google AI chatbot. I could be wrong, but I feel that she’s starting to slip into AI psychosis. She has also spent a lot of time going down random rabbit holes and looking into conspiracy theories on the internet. One particular thing she has spent a lot of time on is trying to solve the Nancy Guthrie case. She wrote this whole thing detailing her theories, and says that she discusses it on some true crime platform with other like minded people. I know this isn’t particularly harmful or bad. I know that everyone has hobbies and interests, but she bed rots all day and spends time on this instead of looking for a job.
About two years ago when I first started to notice something off with her, she began hanging out with a new group of friends. One of them she knew from networking events, and slowly over time began getting to know the others. I’ve met most of them and they’re nice, but some of the things they’ve gotten her into concern me. For example, she started vaping after she met them which she never did before.
She was never really a smoker, but apparently she started smoking cigarettes when hanging out with them and one of her friends got her a vape so she would stop. To be honest, I’d rather her smoke a cig with friends occasionally than vape all day long. She told me when I was younger that cigs always made her sick anytime she tried them, so it was never something she did on a regular basis. Just the occasional drunk cig.
In the middle of me writing this, my mom smoked the last cig from a pack I didn’t know she had. I knew that she bought a pack that’s hard to get in CA where we’re from. Apparently you can only buy them on sovereign land (in this case, a casino down the street from our house). She mentioned that she bought a pack recently for a friend of her’s, but I didn’t know she had her own. I was not expecting that.
My brother kind of already vaped, but started doing it more when she started doing it. For the last 2 years, she has been buying 2 vapes at a time, and sharing them with him. This started when he was 17. I just think it’s insane, but maybe I’m overthinking it. I refuse to get addicted to nicotine, so I don’t vape.
She recently went on a trip to Vegas with this group of friends, and she said they did shrooms. She also admitted to doing Molly somewhat recently as well. I knew she did this stuff in her 20s, but I didn’t know she was doing it at the age of 55. I know she’s an adult and not doing hard drugs, but combined with everything else, I find it concerning.
The friend she bought the cigarettes for is a nurse, and convinced my mom of some things that are kind of insane. For example, she told her that birth control gives off a negative pheromone to men, and causes women to attract bad male partners. Because of this, she tried to get me to remove my Nexplanon, but I refused. I did some research, and humans are unable to detect pheromones; only animals are. I’ve met this friend, and she is nice. I don’t mean to question what she knows given that she did go to school to become a nurse, but some of the things she says don’t sit right with me. She’s conservative too, which kind of concerns me as well.
The most concerning thing as of recently (like within the last few days) is how obsessed she has become with cybersecurity. It started when she began obsessively analyzing every single device that shown up in our Xfinity app. Our WiFi has been kind of slow, and she attributes it to devices that have previously connected but weren’t in our house at the moment. Examples include my brother’s girlfriend, friends, etc. My friend who works in IT explained that Xfinity is notorious for having devices that have connected previously show up in the app, but they’re not the reason our WiFi is slow.
She also keeps getting alerts from Xfinity that my phone has been visiting sketchy websites. I don’t recognize any of the domains, so they’re probably just apps and things running in the background. My friend explained that Xfinity is doing what it’s supposed to do, but it’s really nothing to worry about which is also what I figured. I will say that she did get a verification code that wasn’t requested by any of us, which is why she thinks our network is being hacked. It is strange, but I don’t want to jump to conclusions. She has changed the network name and password numerous times over the past year. At one point, she was convinced our neighbors were trying to hack into our network, but I don’t think that’s true.
Because my mom doesn’t have a job, she doesn’t have health insurance. My college health insurance ended when I graduated, and I got on to Medical. She tried to get on it, but because of her last paycheck, she said it would be really expensive since it goes off of income. I’ve been asking her to get therapy since before she quit her job and lost her insurance, but she wouldn’t. She finds it embarrassing and says that talking about her issues makes her feel worse. I did therapy for a while, and I felt like it helped me.
Even before she quit her job, I was concerned about other things. For example, one of our showers broke (the one that my brother and I share) over a year ago and she hasn’t gotten it fixed. We have home owner’s insurance, but she’s too embarrassed to have anyone come look at it because of how the house looks. She also doesn’t want our insurance to raise our rates or drop us. Since then, we’ve all been using her shower.
At one point, she was driving around without car insurance for over a year. Because my brother was on her insurance, he was too. Her insurance dropped her because she got too many speeding tickets, cellphone tickets, and had a few accidents on her record. She’s not the best driver tbh. She finally got some, but it took forever.
I’m no stranger to mental health struggles. I’ve been depressed since I was 15, and still struggle to this day. However, I went to therapy and I’m on medication. This might sound crazy, but I feel like the two of us are feeding off of each other’s depression. I have been more depressed since I got home and have seen how things are around here. I think things will be better for us once we both get jobs, but it hasn’t been easy.
Anyway, I’m sorry that this is long and all over the place. My mom won’t help herself, and I know I can’t force her to. I know I am an adult and am responsible for myself, however I don’t know what to do. I don’t think anyone in our family really sees what’s going on because they’re not close by. I don’t want to blame her group of friends, but that’s when I started noticing things taking a turn for the worst. I never imagined my mother would be unemployed, vaping, and bed rotting all day. Is there anything I can do?