Strange people in a strange land

Sometimes as a teacher I run into people who are strange and sad, and I cannot really do much to help them. Today I was working in the Writing Lab and met one of those people. This student looked normal enough. He was a student in a political science class, assigned to write about Obama's first weeks in office, but his English was so poor that I had a hard time making sense out of what he was trying to say. After a paragraph of struggling through these sentences, I finally told him he needed to take an ESL course before he could write papers like these.
He told me that if I took one along with him, he would enroll. At first, I thought it was just the sort of resistance that I had seen before, from students who found a stigma attached to being in such a class. But then he began to veer wildly off the track of the usual complaints. It seems, according to him, that someone has been breaking into his documents and changing them, slyly and subtly, that people like me at the Writing Center have a political agenda and we want to convince him that he is not adequate as a person. I of course insisted that it was not true that I meant to imply anything of the sort, but it was clear by this time that Iwas dealing with a mentally ill person, so I let it go. Sad; I wish I could have said something or done something to make a difference, but there wasn't much I could do.