I am desperate for advice about my mother with mental illness and dementia.

Hello,

My mother is 65 and has always had mental illness -- specifically OCD and dementia. She has also always been extremely controlling, manipulative, stubborn, sneaky, narcissistic, and majorly obsessive. Around summertime she started losing her short-term memory. Now she is very far gone and can't remember what's going on from one moment to another, but to make matters much worse, she has become extraordinarily belligerent and verbally abusive, as well as so obsessive that my dad, who somehow never divorced her, storms out of their house screaming and cursing every night when he's had enough. She'll call his cell phone repeatedly while he's gone for a drive to cool off; once she left 39 voicemails in an hour.

I moved to their home state to assess the situation and help out, and I actually feel helpless. My dad is like her hostage and lives in fear of her. I have blocked all her numbers and email because she contacts me obsessively. She will ride him until he caves and calls me, every day. He has no control over her.

From morning till night, she obsesses over the same things every day -- the shadow above her upper lip and the discoloration on her chest from years of eczema. She'll keep my dad in the bathroom for hours looking at and if he tries to leave, she screams at him. It sounds like Linda Blair in the Excorcist. She keeps her doctor's appointments -- about 4 per month -- written on FIVE separate lists all taped on the same wall. She goes over them obsessively for hours every day and forces my dad to do so with her. When he tries to escape or shut her down, she follows him around the house insulting him, cursing at him, and threatening him.

She is tearing my entire family apart, and my brother has a baby on the way. My main concerns are protecting my father from having a heart attack from stress, and protecting the unborn baby and his parents from her aggressive, relentless, nonstop insanity.

The problem I'm having is that I cannot, for the life of me, get anyone to understand how dire the situation is. When we take her to the neurologist, he does MRIs and tells us he doesn't see anything significant. He ups her dose of antidepressant and sends us on our way. Finally I took him aside and told him the extent of the problem, and he said he is sorry but there is no easy solution. He said she probably has dementia and it has made her mental illness flare up to the point of complete insanity, literally. But she puts on a show in front of him.

I have considered calling mobile crisis, but I fear she will put on a show for them and they will not take her in for an inpatient psychiatric evaluation. Her neurologist even advises against it. He says, lets try medication first and if it doesn't work we'll look into having her put in a facility. It'll be a slow process, he said.

Meanwhile my dad calls me in desperation every day. He loses his temper with her and has no sense of protecting me or my brother (we are adults, but still). He says, I am between a rock and a hard place here. But the truth is he simply does not know how to stand up to her. She is literally 100 pounds but she has such evil and venom inside of her, and she has spent a lifetime emasculating and brow-beating him.

What on Earth can I do to get her the emergency care she needs? To get someone to understand how dire and relentless this problem is and to intervene? We are all living in a private hell, daily. Does anyone have any advice? Thank you so much in advance!