I feel for you. My first wife suffered from much the same thing. You've pretty much described her to a "tee". She's 54 years old now and hasn't changed much si

I feel for you. My first wife suffered from much the same thing. You've pretty much described her to a "tee". She's 54 years old now and hasn't changed much since her first "breakdown" in her early 20s. I think it's safe to say she never will. Her's was triggered by postpartum syndrome after we had a child that died shortly after birth. It was a terrible thing to witness. It happened over the course of about two weeks and got to the point where it was an obvious safety issue for our year old daughter so I had to have her "committed". She spent time in various psyche wards in the Los Angeles area, including the County Hospital. I visited her there many times and I can attest that it was always an adventure. She was never a threat to me or anyone else but she's committed petty crimes on occasion while living on the streets. She's bounced around between halfway houses and the streets and brief stays in psyche wards and local jails since. I left California when our daughter was 3-1/2 years old. Over the years since when she's been doing good our daughter has visited her for a few weeks at a time and got to know her and that side of her family, so for us it's not been near so hard as could have been. Getting our daughter away from that chaos was a deliberate decision on my part. I didn't want her constantly wrapped up in that. I've helped her mother out many times over the years and never turned down her requests for help, but there's been years go by in between when we didn't hear from her and often when we did she contacted me to ask for money and didn't want to get back into any sort of program. She has a brother who's set her with an apartment and paid all her bills and gave her a comfortable allowance over the past ten or more years and she's decided to head back to the streets and disappeared a few times still. Last we heard she was doing a short stint in jail somewhere out there. When she's doing good she's really quite brilliant, and when she heads out to the streets she's as determined to be there as one could be and there is no stopping her. I don't see how it would do any good to lock her up. Not her or society as a whole. It's true, she hasn't stayed long in any public housing or program, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be there and available when she's needing it or willing to try and work at normalizing. I know for sure it's helped her many times.