This is actually my ex-stepmom-in-law. (Complicated—she is my ex-husband's step mom. But doesn't matter, I love her like she is my own mom—hence, I will just call her my mom.)

My ex-father-in-law (who I am still close to, so I will just call him my dad) tells me that mom has suffered from delusions that she is being cyber stalked since the 90s.

At it's worst, about 4-5 years ago, she was hospitalized for a little under a week after fully planning out her suicide. She was going to take her laptop to a hotel and kill herself with the laptop open to show the "stalkers" what they had made her do to herself.

In the last 5-6 years, she's gone through 10+ phone numbers, 10+ mobile devices (constantly getting rid of phones and getting new ones because she believes hers have been compromised somehow.)

Once before (years ago) she's come down and totally taken apart the family computer because she believed someone had broken into the house and installed something in it, some hardware.

The delusions always change and evolve over time. But they are always centered around cyberstalking. She can never say why she thinks the stalking is happening, exactly—she isn't sure herself, but she speculates. The person/group she thinks is stalking her is always different, too.

My dad can't even have his laptop at the house because over time it gets to a point where she is disassembling it or going in and running updates and deleting files to the point where it's un-usable.

In just the last 6 months, she's pointed to a red light in the back yard, off in the distance (a neighbor's appliance probably, or something completely innocuous) and told me that it's a drone that watches her.

If her phone tells her that updates are available ("updates" is a word that scares her) and a car just so happens to be parked on her street, she assumes the person in the car is sending signals to her phone to try and watch her somehow.

She reads way too into people walking around in the neighborhood, like if they walk by the house looking on their phones, she assumes it has something to do with her.

The worst thing she does is day in and day out read the "logs" on her Android phone and tablet. I don't know how to explain what I mean by "logs"—it's like a thing you can look at on your phone that keeps track of every activity, but to the layman it looks like gobbeldy-gook.

The logs barely make sense to me, and she most certainly doesn't understand them, but she reads them as a way to keep herself feeling under control and reads words and phrases that scare her. "Node." "Fatal error." "Runtime." "AVD." "Tether." Whatever gobbeldy gook comes out. Then she'll google what it means. AVD for example is some kind of emulator and now she thinks someone has a copy of her device somewhere.

She works part-time at a library and she currently believes people at her work are tapping into her phone and reading all her texts, etc. There's a man who comes in regularly who just started coming in—the man remembers her from a church she used to go to. She brought the man up to my dad, and he doesn't remember this person...not a big deal. It happens. But she's convinced that her phone and the computers at work "do weird things" now when he comes in.

Also, recently, she cut ties with some extended family because she believed they "installed a server" into her phone charger when she accidentally left her phone charger there overnight...she swears that once she plugged her phone into the charger it started "acting weird" and the logs suggested that someone had been downloading data from her or something...she insisted that this extended family member had said things that implied she'd tamper with the phone charger...

I work in tech in the Bay Area (she's in rural indiana) and something about me working out here comforts her, like I have insight and knowledge about all these things that scare her, so she trusts me a lot when I try to explain certain things to her and it seems to comfort her. Often she'll screencap things to send me or text me long texts with her worries and concerns and speculations and I can define certain terms for her, or assure her that what she just saw pop up is just a marketing trick, or whatever.

I understand some of her triggers...she was assaulted and stalked when she was a teenager, as was her mother, so it makes absolute sense to me that her delusions are a reflection of that...she is so close to her family. Me, dad, her granddaughter...all of us are her whole entire world.

She is VERY functional besides this. She does a great job at work. She is a wonderful grandma. She takes care of herself and the home, and then some. She had to quit a wonderful job about 5-6 years back when the delusions got really bad, but she got back into the workforce about 1.5 years ago and is doing well.

The more I comfort her the more she seems able to get apps like Facebook and Instagram back so that she can stay connected to the family.

But the delusions really don't go away, and I know they probably won't. Dad knows they probably won't, and after living through years of having to keep TVs unplugged and covered up because she believed people were watching her through it (this isn't the case anymore...they can use TVs normally) it's obvious that he isn't going anywhere. He loves her so much. We all do!

Anyway...they can't do therapy because they don't have the resources but she is on anti-anxiety and ADHD meds from the doctor. Again, rural Indiana.

She's great in all other areas...but I wish there was something that could be done to get her to believe that the stalking is over. Short of coming up with something big....writing a fake letter that looks official and sending it through the mail...which I would NEVER do, but I'm just saying...I don't know what it would take to actually help and comfort her to believe that this isn't happening anymore.

I don't think there is anything anyone can do.

We just try our best to listen to her. We don't judge her. We love her. We don't roll our eyes at her. We hear her. And we do our best to help by explaining things when she asks for help etc.

Is there anything else we can do?