Dear Aunt Noor,                                                                                                                      

We are three sisters, each one of us lives with her own family, and our problem is our mother. Because of her difficult habits that no one can bear, our father divorced her. She is a person who can not be dealt with. She spent most of her time alone; she lives in the village in her father’ home. Every time we visit her, we noticed something abnormal in her conduct. For example, she closed one of the rooms and prevented us from entering it. When we asked her for the reasons, she said I saw lots of snakes and they try to kill me. When we enter the room we find nothing and sometimes she tells us strange stories about that room and what she saw in it.

We feel sorry for our mother and want to help her. Our mother has an unusual sickness called hypochondria, and it will be difficult to persuade her to go to a psychiatrist. This is because she will think that we think of her as crazy. Would you tell us what we should do with her?

B,S,W

Dear sisters,

I will be honest with you, it is your sin that she became sick; you let her live alone for all those years, and you don’t want her to be sick. Instead of living alone, she could live with each one of you even for a while. This is a mother! How can you do it with her even if she is difficult to deal with. What would happen if she lived with one of you? Would she criticize you or shout at you, so what? Anyway, it is too late to blame.

See, as long as her condition is serious and she needs to go to a psychiatrist, try to persuade her in any way. She said she is not sure about what she sees and if they are real or not, therefore, it will be easy for you to take her to the psychiatrist because she started to feel that she sees many strange things.

Or you can tell her that she has to go to a doctor without telling her that he is a psychiatrist, you can lie in this situation.

I hope that she will recover and my advice to all of you is don’t let her live alone anymore, she talks to herself because she has no one to talk with,  that is why her condition has gotten worse. Stay with and support her, not only physically but also mentally.

Good Luck.

To ask Aunt Noor for her Advice , email her at noor@yemenpost.net