What can I say to my crazy neighbour? Please consider this as a short story.→[More:]

I moved into a new apartment in October this year. My new place is in a very old house, a duplex with two apartments up and two down, in a quiet and safe neighbourhood. I am in one of the downstairs apartments. My crazy neighbour is in the other downstairs apartment. I’d guess she is in her late 30s and she is deeply troubled. The general consensus is that she makes her living hooking out of her apartment. That doesn’t concern me but it is surely relevant. She is as skinny as a pole and doesn’t look too healthy. The other neighbours hate her. The reasons follow...

Here’s how I met her: shortly after moving in I was sitting out back (patio/parking, whole area fenced in) when she emerged hiding a big stick with a nail poking out of it under her jacket. Yer typical home-made mace. She introduced herself (rationally, but obviously nervous and a bit manic in her speech) and to make an intense five-minute encounter short she explained to me that she was looking for the man who is stalking her. She had just seen him out here somewhere. I hadn’t seen anybody and I had been sitting out there for a good 20 minutes. But I am not the most observant fellow at the best of times.

I had been forewarned so this encounter was not unexpected. I took over the apartment from one of my students and she told me about the “stalker” and that the police had been involved and that they had judged my neighbour a crank. So I asked her careful questions about her stalker and she told me some highly unlikely stuff, delusional stuff to be sure (e.g. he was able to sneak through holes in the fence that are plainly too small for a person).

I’ll tell you now that I am intimately familiar with delusional thinking. I had an acute manic episode that lasted for the month of August in ‘97 and I had all sorts of strange beliefs (I bet you’ve never been Frodo, and this was before the movies came out!), and all of it was true to me at the time. I spent September of that year in a locked ward and full of nasty, nasty enforced dope. Risperidone was the worst. Haldoperidol comes in a close second. Ahhhh blessed Ativan! I am lucky that it was a one-off event (I’m not, as it turns out, bi-polar, I'm just alcoholic ;-). But it was a profound and lasting experience. I know crazy. Psychosis is ridiculous.

Anyhooo! Last week the person above her moved out and she became convinced that her stalker was somehow moving around in the vacant apartment above her. In this old house sound travels very, very well from corner to corner. She called the rental agent and the rental agent was so freaked out that she asked me to accompany her up to check out the apartment. Yup: doors locked and no sign of anyone. No footprints anywhere, so to speak.

So this morning I was out shovelling snow and my neighbour peeked out her door and begged me to come into her place. Begged is the correct word. I knew what the conversation would be about. I went in because I had to. Madness is compelling and at my root I am a helpful person, and I was curious and she needed some help. She was in distress in a way, an interpersonal way. It was a shared, psychotic emergency. A strange and upsetting moment for me. I acted.

She had something to show me about the people stalking her. Or the guy. She didn’t seem to be sure. “Them” and “he” were intechangeable and she was more scared and agitated than I have seen her before. But she was "rational". She was reasoning with me and in no way out of control. She showed me some “break away doors” and ceilings that he/they can use to access her apartment. Now, this is an old house with all kinds of panelling covering all kinds of weird carpentry. My tiny bathroom is a work of creative panelling art. I tried to explain this but she wasn’t having any of it, of course. And I must admit that old houses like this can be creepy if you are in a certain frame of mind. Then she insisted that “they” were trying to cut their way into her bedroom from the crawl space below the house. She showed me the spot in the corner of her bedroom where she had heard the sounds from below. She said that the carpet edge below her baseboard heater had been disturbed (indeed it was curled up but I hadn’t seen it before...) and that she had “heard the knives cutting”. So we lifted the carpet in that corner of the room, and then the underpad, and she said, “There! See!” and indeed I did: cracks in the plywood. Straight, parallel cracks, as will happen with plywood. She wasn’t having that either and then it got a bit weirder, at least for me.

She said that there was something (a creature I assume, but one in on the plot) living inside her new mattress. The mattress had no sheets on it (for that I am grateful) and she insisted that I lay my hands on the mattress and “wait, wait to feel the movement”. It was a movie moment, I tell ya. So I spread my hands over the mattress. And I told her, honestly, that I didn’t feel anything other than the springs. She replied, “Wait, I’ll show you.” and proceeded to get up on the bed and jump up and down, trying to agitate the creature into movement. Still no go. So out comes the baseball bat and she starts beating the crap out of the mattress. “No,” I say, “I still don’t feel anything.” I mean, what else can you say at a time like that? She was dissapointed and I told her I had to go (I did have to go) and I let myself out the back door and we kept talking. She kept me as long as she could (as would I if I was that scared and had a sympathetic ear) but I just ran out of things to say.

And this is what I am concerned about. All through our encounters I have been trying very carefully and gently to explain these “events”—which are of course real to her—as part of the natural, sane order of things: the sounds are our neighbours in this old house; the “access doors” are just panelling covering up structural warts. Etc. But as delusional thinkers will do she just ignores that thinking and goes on to the next worry. My words, beyond comforting her for the few minutes I am talking to her, do her no good. In writing this I am thinking that she is schizophrenic. But she is not currently “a danger to herself or others” so there is little that can be done in terms of medication. I just wonder if I am handling this right. What can I best do to help her?

Sorry for writing so long. I just needed to write to sort this out. Yeah, GYOFB is right in this case. I guess I want feedback from other people who have dealt with crazy people to whom the law at this time does not apply. People tried to talk reason to me when I was manic but I was really, really over the top. She is not. It saddens and disturbs me. Anyways, thanks for reading and here is some great jazz guitar, Joe Pass solo playing Cheek to Cheek.