I need help for my step sister. She is in deep mental pain and I believe suffering from schizophrenia as she has an extensive family history (both mother and grandmother) and exhibits all the signs (see below).
Her mother was a schizophrenic who used hard drugs when she was pregnant with her and abused her physically, mentally and emotionally until my stepfather rescued her and gained sole custody. We had a hectic childhood and she was never able to make many friends and had to be homeschooled because of emotional issues. Still, until about a year ago, she led a relatively normal life and even worked a job or two (which never turned out well but we tried our best to support her). Then, over the past few years she had to endure one stressful event after another. The dog she raised died, a close friend died and my mother was diagnosed with cancer (which she thankfully beat). To make matters worse she started using marijuana to alleviate certain issues which, I believe, may have made things worse.
Since then she has been on a slow, but steady decline. She always had emotional problems and was a habitual liar but was still somewhat functional. Then she started making increasingly bizarre, sometimes contradictory statements or changed subjects in the middle of a sentence, and somewhat recently started believing in conspiracy theories such as the moon landing is fake, the world is flat and pizzagate. Whenever we tried to tell her that these ideas were improbable she would angrily flip out. Then things got real bad. She came to believe that a website could read her mind and inject thoughts in her head. When we tried to tell her that this was impossible she became borderline violent. She started talking to herself and said she heard voices in her head and now spends most of her time in her room, often crying and screaming about the voices.
We try to help by talking to her and checking up on her. We hug her and offer her advice and try to teach her how to meditate and do other calming activities but that only does so much. We tried convincing her to see a therapist or go to the doctors but she refuses, and because she hasn’t really threatened or hurt anyone we can’t really make her get help either. She is deeply paranoid about taking any sort of pharmaceutical drug or supplement. We do our best but it is never enough no matter how hard we try. We are at our wits end and everyone is stressed to the point of being sick.I’m afraid someone might get hurt at this point as she recently shoved my step dad after he tried to talk to her. What can we do to help someone who refuses help?