The guy is in a nursing home with parkinson's, but he must have "hired" other people to continue harassing my father. We have moved him, yet he continues to believe this person has people follow us and poison his food when ever we buy something for him at a restaurant? Been going on for 12 years, he is now 79 years old. He has called and written the FBI, the local police, as PI, etc. He has installed cameras, motion detectors, etc., which only take photos of him. Then he claims they use a clockijng device to "beat" the camera, or they access it and erase themselves. DO I just keeo going along with him, and continue to help him try and find these people, or what? When ever I try and talk with him about this, he yells and cussess me out and claims I am helping them? He trust no one, unless you believe him or do what he wants. He now wants to contact the Southern Poverty Law Center to have them investigate this guys as a "hate-group".
Briefly, it used to be believed that some people with mental illnesses were in denial about their illnesses. Advice would be to tell them and hope to break through their "denial". In the past 10 years there has been some movement on this concept toward recognizing what was seen as denial as instead being another symptom of their illness it's referred to as "lack of insight". The book will give you a clear understanding of the difficulty you are facing.
At the very least it helps you to not do the things that you probably spend a lot of time doing.
(2. Does he have dementia
(3. Has he been like this all his life or just in the past 12 yrs or just in the last
few months
(4. Do you have medical POA or DPOA
What method has given you the best results? It sounds like you have tried going along with the delusion, and you are now telling him it is not true. Which got the better result? Have you tried ignoring it? "Dad, I'm sorry about your issues, but they have nothing to do with me. I can't discuss them with you." "If you are worried about food here being contaminated, just order coffee and you can have a peanut butter sandwich when we get home. I'm ordering the corned beef hash because theirs is the best in the city."
I guess the other question is what would you consider good results? Obviously it would be a success if he didn't have the delusion at all. But he has a mental illness, his VA doctor has prescribed something for him that he won't take, and it seems to me very unlikely that this delusion is going to vanish on its own. So, short of the delusion going away, what would be a good result? Him not talking to you about it? Him not going into yell-and-curse mode? Him not writing to organizations?
All I can suggest is figuring out what you'd most like to achieve (short of a cure), and experiment to see which method works best toward that end.
(And I'll bet your Dad's wouldn't be the first delusional letter the Southern Poverty Law Center has received.)
Some people believe it was the alcohol, that maybe he was having a dry spell from it when he had this paranoia. I know he wasn't having a dry spell. What I suspect was that he was having small strokes that were creating the hallucinations and delusions. Small strokes can really play tricks on the mind. I have heard of several people who became delusional, usually paranoid, and were diagnosed with the strokes.
If you think that this may have something to do with your father, talk to his doctor about the paranoia. The delusion may be something else entirely, but it is useful to eliminate stroke as a possibility.