Does your Parent in a Home Suddenly have Dementia Signs? Is it Natural?
If you have an elderly parent in a nursing home, and you heard of this study, you'd be shocked too - more than two out of three elderly inmates at nursing homes receive mental health treatment. The study was done by a researching crew from the University of Florida. And they found that in Florida's nursing homes, more than two out of three residents with Medicaid support receive diagnoses for mental problems, as soon as they come to live there - and they hadn't had any problems of that kind before and had never been a part of any psychiatric diagnosis. Many of these people were getting plenty of psychiatric medicines - for dementia, schizophrenia and depression. And the nursing homes tried less disruptive treatment like behavioral therapy, only with one out of ten cases.
Should we be startled? Or is there something here that we aren't quite understanding. Some experts aren't shocked at all by this. To them, it isn't a sign of how callous and cruel conditions are in nursing homes and centers that care for the elderly. It's just a sign of the truth everyone is aware of - that mental health problems, dementia signs, bipolar, schizophrenia, depression and everything related, are almost universal among elderly residents in these homes. The experts say that if you ever worked in a nursing home, you would know how much elderly people needed mental health care. So okay, a good proportion of these residents need mental health care; but why two out of three? It would seem like psychiatrists working at these homes are somehow stuck on using drugs to solve every problem. And if you take that together with the kind of other physical illnesses they have that they take a dozen drugs for, you'll probably find that elderly home residence have terrible problems with drug interactions.
This isn't some obscure problem. Congress is aware of this. Congress passed a law under President Reagan that forced nursing homes to use non-drug methods to help their residents before they ever considered pumping them full of drugs. The law however looks the other way for residents who are brought in from hospitals, not from family's home. And so, most residents don't ever get to be protected under the law. And they're not. It's very unfortunate that just because the elderly show dementia signs, signs of a troubled mental life, that they should be forced summarily to take drugs.
Most of these nursing homes don't even have enough psychiatric specialists on hand to regularly look after these poor people who are put on these drugs. Less than half of them have enough doctors to arrange for consultations with each patient each week; those who do, don't have specialists who know a great deal about care of the old. Just consider what happens to the old people who live here, a place where one nurse usually has to take care of 15 residents. Let's say that an old woman needs to go to the bathroom and needs help for it. She gets none for a half hour, and is really annoyed; she starts agitating over this; irritated home staff pump her full of tranquilizers, and keep her on them indefinitely.
If the staff are pushed hard enough, they even use schizophrenia medicines to treat residents who are having trouble sleeping, and who are having trouble with dementia signs. This is actually off label, not entirely legal. It's not enough to just blame the nursing homes for being inhuman. There is little they can do with so few geriatric professionals available, and when they have such tight budgets to work on. Would you believe that half the drugs they give to nursing home residents are just to keep them quiet? You regularly hear stories from families that go, "My father was just fine when he was with us; but two weeks after he moved into the nursing home, he could barely remember our names". A nursing home or an elderly assisted care center isn't a way to just leave behind your problems with an elderly loved one who lives with you. You need to completely be in touch with what goes on there, to be a hands-on guardian. Because what goes on in the nursing homes is nothing like you would like to be.