You should leave a spouse with mental illness when your spouses behavior threatens your physical or emotional safety or if your spouses mental illness is making your spouse a danger your children or when your spouse persistently refuses to seek professional treatment.
While it can be hard and painful to decide to walk away from your spouse with a mental health condition, sometimes you have to do so for your own safety or even for your child or children's safety if you have them.
You're not responsible for curing your spouses mental illness and you're also not obligated to sacrifice your own well being.
The signs that it may be time to leave your spouse with a mental illness include:
Active self harm risk, in which your partner threatens or even attempts suicide, or if they engage in extreme self destructive acts that you can't manage alone safely.
Severe caregiver burnout, in which you feel chronic anxiety, depression or even hopelessness, and the relationship with your spouse also compromises your own physical health and mental health.
Refusal of treatment, in which your spouse refuses to see a doctor or take prescribed medication, or even engage in therapy despite repeated support and the clear harm that their actions cause.
Your spouse becomes a danger to children, in which the home environment is unsafe, unstable or damaging to any children that may be involved.
And physical or emotional abuse, where you face verbal threats, physical violence or extreme psychological manipulation.
Mental health struggles and mental illnesses don't give your partner the right to abuse or control you.
And while the mental illness itself is not your spouse's fault, managing the mental illness and seeking treatment for their mental illness is and still remains their responsibility.
And so leaving your spouse when needed is a step to preserve your health and safety and not an act of abandonment.