just restating the points:

1) My wife, duringthe past years, I supect because of some depression syndrome, has been isolating herself from relatives and friends.

2) Subconsciously? Would it be subconsciously if I were able to deepen the analysis and answer “maybe”?

3) She is always unsatisfied. Every little issue is a reason to ruin the day. Always enraged about everything. Always something to blame on the husband, on the kids, on the mother and/or in general on the person she is having contact with.

4) My wife tells me that if she’s so hysterical it is because of how the husband/the kids/the people/her mother treat her (most often the husband…).

5) After 10 years I have little hope. I do not know (and I am a little scared actually) what the menopause will bring.

6) I sticked to the decision mostly because of the kids.First reason: in case of separation my wife would have got sole custody. Second reason: my kids would have been subject to her behaviour without any help. May be in some years the kids will be grown enough to try something else.

Again: subconsciously? Believe me: I am an average family, lazy enough not be committed to any life mission or supreme sacrifice. I am also enough cynic and sceptical not to pretend to be some hero-husband.
———————————-

The dialogues you supposed about my wife, the doctor and me are not quite plausible. This would have been more probable:

Me: “Don’t you see how loud you are crying just because of this little stain on the cloth?”
My wife (crying out loud): “I am not crying because of the cloth but because you seem not to understand how hard I worked to have everything perfect on the table, you always treat me like that, like that time that…”

An episode of three years before follows. Then more fighting, some slap to the first kid coming around, something thrown at me.

I have not even the chance to get to the therapy part…

Doctor: “…not feeling so well, hm? Well, sometimes, with women, this can be hormone-related. Do you have strong mood swings especially during menstruation?”

Wife: “Yeah, I think so.”

Doctor: “Ah, well, yes… well, if this continues, and I advise you to screen this for a while and analyse the situation, there is always the option of taking medication against it.”

Wife: *thinking* WTF, like, being drugged for having mood swings? No thanks! *saying* “Er, I’ll watch what’s going on for a while, but I don’t think so.”

*at home, wife to you* “Guess what, the doctor said I should take drugs against PMS! Imagine that!”

You: *thinking* Yay, no more mood swings! *saying* “Well, I think that’s a good idea. Will you?”

Wife: *thinking* WTF? You know nothing of my situation, my feelings on the matter, or the concrete discussion at hand and the first thing you say that it’s a good idea to drug me? *saying* WTF? No!

You: Come on, you know how I and the kids suffer from your mood swings!

Wife: *thinking* Is this about my illness or me being a nuisance? *saying* Like I care! I won’t be drugged!

And so on, and so on.
How does that sound in terms of realism?

They just are too proud and stubborn (it is a valuable feature of my wife’s character) to admit.

Like some elders that refuses to admit some age-related problems like loss of memory or car-driving difficulties.

I cannot consider my wife mentally-ill. The consequence is that I have to consider her wrong in not admitting the problem.

She was and she is wrong. She could maybe have relieved so much her suffering, avoided so many discussions, avoided so many fights. We could have had so many quiet (quieter) years of living together.

May be the point of this post and of these comments is that maybe sometimes (repeat: maybe, sometimes) there is a connection between a person character, hormonal imbalances and psychological/psychiatric illness.

And that this connection (if and whent it actually exists) can be more visible in women.

1) I am sorry to hear that your wife doesn’t like the idea of therapy. This is a situation I know too well and I know it can be years before a person is ready to agree even to look for a suitable therapist. (It’s to do with the stigmatization of people who “go and see a shrink”, I think.) And the search itself, then, is hard too, of course. Patient and therapist must match.
Would it, perhaps help, to discuss the two options (medication and therapy) seperately? One definitely doesn’t have to go with the other. Does your wife have friends/best friends/siblings with whom to discuss these things, other than you? (Necessary, hard though it was for me to learn that, at the time.)

2) Not even subconsciously? How can you be sure?

3) How did your wife’s character get “ruined” by the depression? Which elements got lost? The stubbornness, clearly, is still there. What do you miss these days?

4) No, but that is exactly what I was talking about! Depression is an illness, which makes you do EXACTLY these things! It is an illness, which sometimes prevents you from noticing that you are ill in the first place, it is an illness, which makes you refuse treatment. Anyone with a broken leg will gladly see a doctor about it, I’d wager. This is not the case with depression! That is part of this shitty deal, as I am sure someone must have told you in all these years…?
I know it is hard, I know it takes more patience than one person alone feels they can muster, but you need to tell yourself, and emphasise this in front of your wife, too, that you do not blame her for something she has no control over.

5) Hm. I see. I can’t advise anything but to keep trying, though, as I really feel therapy is the only way out of a strong depression. Are there other means of therapy that might work, perhaps? Online or telephone counselling, for instance?

6) What I meant was: even if you had this big moment of deciding to stick with this situation 15 years ago, you are still making this decision again every day of your life. I am married, too (though not for as long). That doesn’t mean I can’t possibly take the option of a separation from my partner into account. Views can change, circumstances can change, and if you don’t reserve yourself the right to get out any day, what is your loyalty really worth, in the end? And can you then really express it properly, non-accusingly? Making one promise and then sticking to it makes it your wife’s “fault” that you stay. Re-making the promise (just for yourself) every day makes it your own responsibility, but also your own achievement, and puts control back into your hands. Which I think you can use right now.

I do by no means wish to sound as though I am trying to persuade you to leave her. On the contrary. I admire your perseverance in the face of this illness because I know first hand that it can ruin a relationship and that the decision to stay and fight (with, not against your spouse) is a hard one, every day.
Then again, I also know that a person who ploughs on out of a false sense of commitment, who then subconsciously blames their partner and would rather like to be commended for their sacrifice all day long, may ruin more than they do good in such a situation. In particular, of course, you will ruin yourself, eventually. And believe me, when you’re suffering from depression you want the people around you to be mentally healthy.

It feels to me as though a doctor discussing a possible diagnosis with her patient, possibly to allow this patient to get to know her or his own body better and to encourage an interpretation of the symptoms, implies something different from a doctor telling a patient’s spouse or family that the patient needs medication.
The latter I find a little creepy, actually.

I didn’t say or mean to say that monthly hormonal changes or menstruation-related crabby feelings don’t exist. I said I don’t believe in them as the sole or even the main cause for “typical” PMS behaviour!

This is me utilizing Schachter’s two-factor theory of emotion, assuming that emotions are the result of physiological arousal AND cognition, that is, interpretation through the experiencing individual. This is also me trying to interpret Plutchik (a googling result) correctly in assuming that our so-called primary emotions always come with a less intensive counterpart, such as boredom, distraction or pensiveness, which then may be intensified through outside factors.
I therefore argue that the actual cause of stereotypically destructive “PMS behaviour” may be more socially constructed than we assume, due to the way the concept of PMS is advertised in today’s society.
This is not, and I’d like to emphasise this – this is NOT me pretending that hormonal cycles doesn’t exist. But the entire concept and shape of “typical PMS behaviour”, including the assumption that it is a women’s thing alone, that it must always result in irrational behaviour and treatment of one’s own perceptions, or even that it exists as an independent entity which “makes women behave strangely” – that is something I strongly reject, which is why I said, a little unelegantly perhaps, that “I don’t believe” in PMS. That’s what I meant.

To take this a little further, and to do some more replying to DPK, too:

My take on the matter of PMS is this: if a person feels crabby enough to lash out at those around them, placing the problem with this person’s hormones instead of talking about the source of their unwell-being (depression, in this case) means looking at this person not as a human being, whose suffering is to be ended, but as a thing who causes problems and is therefore in need of fixing. It is moral reasoning in accordance with Kant (or Pratchett, if you prefer).

I don’t live in my mother’s basement, but in defense of the many good men out there who are jerking it in their mother’s basement as I type this, let me note that the same society that tells you that a single man who lives in his mother’s basement is a loser also tells us that trans people are mutilated freaks who suffer from a mental illness.

People can conduct their lives how they please. I’d think you’d be a bit more sympathetic to a group of people who fail to live up to society’s expectation of what they should be.

DON’T FEED THE TROLL

But no really. GTFO sociological images. Don’t you have somewhere else to be? like 4Chan? or jerking off in your mother’s basement?

like

really devastatingly

Yeah I know trans people are killed everyday for basically no reason. Being a trans person must be a living nightmare. Won’t stop me from making fun of it. Horror is the essential nature of our universe, once you understand that you will be reduced to cackling madness as you stare into the empty, sucking blackness of the void. Then you start trolling on sociological images and laughing at murdered transpeople, the holocaust, and your own daily slide into addiction and suicidal depression.

Your wants and needs are laughable. Everything is laughable, your pain is a joke in the eyes of a cold and indifferent God who has just as little love for you as he does for the snarling, hate-filled, reactionary mobs that seek to demonize your existence. You should find some solace in the fact that those who hate you will one day be consumed in the hell-fire of nuclear armageddon, and their deaths will be just as meaningless and without purpose as those of the countless trans people who have killed themselves in frustration, solitude and despair.