My brother has several co-morbidities:
Bipolar Disorder II or Cyclothymic - the diagnosis has changed a couple times
Borderline Personality Disorder
Adult ADHD
He is, as you can imagine, a pretty tortured person and a generally unhappy person. For as much as people with Bipolar disorders have to be committed and regimented to staying on their medication and having people who can closely observe when things are 'off' and they need to be packed off for an evaluation and adjustment, my brother has never been able to do this for more than a year or two at most. Most of the time, it's impossible largely because his Borderline and ADHD problems are more supercharged at preventing him from maintaining structure on himself and not reacting destructively to people in his life that try to help.
As a result, my brother is in his late 30s. He has no friends (literally, I'm not even joking) because he burns down friendships pretty quickly, a string of girlfriends who often tend to be dealing with serious trauma-induced mental health issues of their own and/or drug problems and/or aneurotypical issues of their own so those relationships tend to be explosive and short-lived, a fractious relationship with his teenage son who is exhausted of his father and tired of being let down all the time, and has been dependent on family for housing and financial support more on than off in his adult life. My nephew's mother is unfortunately of no help here, as they met in a treatment facility because she has a severe Borderline Personality Disorder herself and has attempted suicide several times over. She's been better in the last few years, but her current husband is the one who seems to be holding her ability to parent my nephew together (he's a motherfucking saint, her husband).
Despite all this my brother is not sick enough to be placed under a conservatorship. We as a family have tried but the standard for that in the state he currently lives in basically holds that he has to be incapacitated or nearly so to have a court rule that way. The best we can do and have done is a series of medical and durable POAs, that my parents have managed until my brother inevitably contacts our family attorney and revokes the POAs. This is often out of spite, more than due to the episodic nature of his illness because he's often attempting to extract money out of my parents for bullshit reasons (a new surfboard, upgrading the stereo in his car, first class tickets to Thailand are some past reasons) and when they won't capitulate, he revokes. Then eventually he relents and all this starts again.
My mother is 74 and is at the end of her fucking rope with all of this and has asked me to take on holding his POAs for the forseeable future. It's in reality something I'm going to have to do when she dies, as my father disowned my brother about a decade ago when my brother accused my parents of sexual/physical abuse in order to leave a treatment center early. For the record: It's not true for a lot of reasons I won't articulate here and my brother recanted the whole tale, after he was confronted and realized it wasn't going to get him out of an involuntary mental health hold.
Anyway.
I'm in deep contemplation about whether or not I want to take this on. On the one hand, we live in different states and the distance makes this easier but also harder for conflicting, opposite reasons. Easier because I don't have to see him in person and I'm much better at telling him 'no fuck off' when he wants a check for something childish and manipulative. Harder because he can resind and then because I'm 1,200 miles away, there's not a lot I can do. But my likely response to that will be 'cool, sounds like you're doing a thing' when he goes for that.
Does anyone have any sort of experience of the practical aspects of POAs? The most I imagine I'll be doing is monitoring his finances. He doesn't overspend because he's bipolar; he does it because he has no financial literacy and impulse buys things due to his ADHD.
And also, I'm just venting because I hate this.
