Help me guide a friend to get a psychiatric evaluation?

I have a close friend, who has been experiencing paranoia for at least seven years.

She's 55F, assigned female at birth, average height and generally slender (I'd guess her at 5'6" and 135lbs). Not a smoker though she may have smoked in her 20s. Definitely was doing party drugs in her 20s. We were friends then, too, but I was borderline straight edge so I never really knew exactly what she was into. Coke and ecstasy I assume. I don't think she's still using anything now.

Years ago (maybe 2018 or so?) she started telling me that telling me that people were secretly recording her and she had to move because they had cameras inside her apartment. I tried to suggest that it seemed implausible and she got frustrated with me not believing her, but it was a lot of really tenuous connections. It was on the level of she washed her blue clothes and hung them to dry in her apartment and then someone in the coffee shop said "blue is the best color" right when she walked in and why would he have said that if he hadn't know that she had hung out blue laundry today. So she was connecting a lot of dots like that and was annoyed that it wasn't immediately obvious to me that people were spying on her.

That was during a visit (we don't live near each other) in maybe 2018.

Within a few months she started to reach out and ask me if I knew who was watching her or if I knew why they were doing it. I said I didn't. I wasn't really sure what to suggest at that point but I eventually blocked her number because I couldn't convince her that I wasn't somehow collaborating with her family to stalk her.

I can still see some of her social media posts and I can see that she's still convinced that she's being watched and says it is ruining her life and she doesn't understand why no one will own up to it. She has lost her job and gotten deep into debt and is living with a parent, but her parent is heavily involved in a Pentecostal community and really only able to support her with prayer.

She recently reached out to me again and I would really like to encourage her to get a psychiatric evaluation, but I don't really know what to tell her. Just "girl, get evaluated" doesn't seem like enough information. I wouldn't know where to start and she's a mess as it is.

Are there things I should specifically suggest? Like "Print out your facebook history and take it to your doctor. Tell them that your friends think you're paranoid and need to be evaluated." or something. She's clearly not well, and not able to advocate for herself.

If she's open to getting help, what should she be asking for?

Posted Mar 6, 2026, 9:51 PM UTC

41
Loading comments…