My Husband Won’t Take His Medicine
Question
My husband has decided to stop taking his immunosupressents (liver transplantee) It has been 11 years since he had the transplant. He tells me that he is 100% sure that he doesn’t need them. I am concerned that he is doing this for other reasons than just to prove he doesn’t need them to live. It is difficult as he is not displaying the usual signs of suicidal intentions but something is just not right. I don’t know who to talk to or how to get him help. He just says, I am doing this because it is my body and I don’t believe I need these pills anymore. I feel like he is using his medication as a self destruct button. I am the only one that knows he is doing this. If his family knew they would go crazy, I believe it would drive him further away. I am worried.
- Dr. Dombeck responds to questions about psychotherapy and mental health problems, from the perspective of his training in clinical psychology.
- Dr. Dombeck intends his responses to provide general educational information to the readership of this website; answers should not be understood to be specific advice intended for any particular individual(s).
- Questions submitted to this column are not guaranteed to receive responses.
- No correspondence takes place.
- No ongoing relationship of any sort (including but not limited to any form of professional relationship) is implied or offered by Dr. Dombeck to people submitting questions.
- Dr. Dombeck, Mental Help Net and CenterSite, LLC make no warranties, express or implied, about the information presented in this column. Dr. Dombeck and Mental Help Net disclaim any and all merchantability or warranty of fitness for a particular purpose or liability in connection with the use or misuse of this service.
- Always consult with your psychotherapist, physician, or psychiatrist first before changing any aspect of your treatment regimen. Do not stop your medication or change the dose of your medication without first consulting with your physician.
Answer
Any time that a patient ignores doctor’s orders regarding medication prescriptions is a time for alarm. However, the situation you describe may be an especially important alarm, inasmuch as my non-physician understanding is that organ transplantees are vulnerable to rejection syndromes where their own immune system attacks the transplanted tissues and destroys them. If this is true, then your husband’s actions are either suicidally motivated or delusional (in the sense of wish fulfillment pipe dreams, not of schizophrenia), and potentially lethal.
The distinction between motivations is important inasmuch as it helps you and your husband’s doctors to know how to help him. If he has become suicidal, then depression may be a factor in his decision, and that depression really quite urgently needs to be identified and treated. If he is delusional, then he really needs a dose of reality testing, and (if I’m wrong and there is some psychosis occuring) perhaps some antipsychotic medication would be in order. By way of reality testing, perhaps his physicians can show him (or at least describe to him) cases where transplantees went off their medications and were harmed? Either way, the quite possibly life-threatening situation with your husband needs to be brought to the attention of his physicians so that they can work out what is happening and offer a treatment plan.
Ask your husband to come with you to a doctor’s appointment. Share with him how concerned you are, what your fears are, and that you love him. If he refuses, you are still within your rights to alert your husband’s doctors to his condition so that they can decide if it is necessary and wise to intervene against his will (e.g., in a case where sucidal motivations are prominant). Ultimately, a determined and persistant sucidal person cannot be stopped. However, often times, someone who has become suicidal can be treated for depression, and that is enough to lessen suicidal urges (or at least forestall them for a time).
The content on this page was originally from MentalHelp.net, a website we acquired and moved to MentalHealth.com in September 2024. This content has not yet been fully updated to meet our content standards and may be incomplete. We are committed to editing, enhancing, and medically reviewing all content by March 31, 2025. Please check back soon, and thank you for visiting MentalHealth.com. Learn more about our content standards here.
We take mental health content seriously, which is why we follow strict content guidelines to deliver the highest quality information possible. All editorial decisions regarding the content published on this site are made by the MentalHealth.com Editorial Team, under the guidance of our Medical Affairs Team.