Advice to avoid the delusional ex

Sometime I am going to make a list of disorders that ought to be in the DSM-5. One would be the crazy delusional vindictive ex, as typified by this letter:

Dear Annie: My son's ex-wife has reported him to child protective services six times and to the police for various things she's invented over the past three years. Due to her false accusations, he has been arrested three times. He has been found innocent of all charges, but she persists.

She charged him with violating a restraining order and appeared in court last week flanked by bodyguards supplied by victim services. This charge was thrown out. My son has never touched her, but she has convinced many people that he is dangerous. She is such a good liar that she actually believes her own stories, which makes her even more convincing.

My son has become so paranoid, he barely leaves his house. He is so depressed that he can barely function and is unable to work. She is slowly killing him. Is there anything he can do besides continue to defend himself? The lawyers' costs have become a nightmare for our whole family. There must be something more we can do besides waiting for her next dramatic step. — Worried Family Members

When a woman gets crazy enough to believe her own lies, she becomes more dangerous, because her friends and counselors will be impressed by her apparent sincerity.

Unfortunately, there is no good answer for this poor man. If the woman is crazy enough, maybe she will do something to get herself arrested or committed. But our society has a very high tolerance for these women, and they are likely to continue to make trouble.

Another crazy ex-wife was the one who framed her husband for mailing ricin lettere:

At this time, a providential break in the case occurred: a New Boston woman named Shannon Richardson walked in to the FBI in Shreveport, LA, and fingered her husband, Nathaniel, as the mailer. Nathaniel was dangerous. He had lots of guns. He didn’t like the President. He was a combat wounded veteran, and he was employed in the defense industrial base (these are all things the FBI has been directed to consider warning signs). The FBI swarmed him at work.

His arrest was all over the news. She is going to prison.

I got some comments in defense of the crazy Stanford professor mom who fled to Hawaii. As usual, she is innocent until proven guilty. But her defender said the dad is child molester and also a Stanford professor, and that she had to flee in order to deny him his supervised visitation.

These allegations only persuade me that the mom is a malicious nut. As far as I know, Stanford professors do not molest their own kids. If there were any hard evidence of it, the dad would be charged with a serious crime. Instead the accusation was used to limit his visits to being supervised. But if the visitation was supervised, then surely the alleged molestation could not have been a concern. If the mom is so far gone as to refuse supervised visitation, then she is quite likely to be crazy or vindictive. If she believes her own lies, then she is dangerous.