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posted by n1 on Sunday August 21 2016, @03:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the repeat-reassure-and-redirect dept.

The other day I was having a consult at the psychogeriatric ward of a local hospital. While we were discussing a CT scan of my father's brain, the psychiatrist mentioned that his ward was really aimed at reshaping disruptive behaviour -- like painting the bathroom with excrement -- of patients with dementia (pdf).

Thinking the conversation over, this sounds a bit like social engineering -- which makes me wonder: have other Soylentils been in a position where they've taken care of an elderly parent, and what psychological principles did you apply to moderate/shape behaviour?


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @04:45AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @04:45AM (#390889)

    When we had to move my mother, we used what people refer to as the bus stop trick. She has serious problems with dementia and memory and would wander off. We live in the country (nearest neighbor is 1/2 mile), so finding her was usually hours later and miles away. While talking with a friend, he mentioned how his mother's Alzheimer's nursing home has a fake bus stop out front. Well, we constructed little huts with glass walls, a bench, bus stop signs, and a heater on our property and the closest neighbors on either side. Whenever mom wandered off or insisted on going home, we let her pack a suitcase and leave. She'd usually go to the bus stop and wait for a bus for a while and then come back. Every so often, we'd get a call from the neighbors that she showed up asking them when the bus was coming, but that, thankfully, became rare. As a bonus, the kids and neighbor's kids loved the stops in the winter as a warm place to wait for the school bus and they are slow spreading around the school district.

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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @04:51AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @04:51AM (#390895)

    My mom was a school bus driver who was gang raped by horny teenagers, you insensitive clod! She never recovered from the experience. To this day we can't even let her look at a bus stop or she will have a panic attack.

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @04:58AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @04:58AM (#390898)

    Thanks for offering about the only compassionate and creative solution so far (in this discussion) to this heart breaking problem.

    If you love your parents, you love them through thick and thin, and while it may be hard (it was for the last 18 months of my father's 101 years), you do it and don't whine about it. Just think of all the shit they got (literally) from you when you were an infant and later a rotten, self absorbed teenager.

    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by darkfeline on Sunday August 21 2016, @06:37AM

      by darkfeline (1030) on Sunday August 21 2016, @06:37AM (#390923) Homepage

      But if you really love your parents, would you subject them to living with dementia? My mom always said, "If I ever get to that point, just off me." Of course, if that day comes, she may very well deny either having dementia or wanting assisted death. Would it be right to respect her present wishes while mentally disabled, or her original wishes while mentally sound? Which is more humane?

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      • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @09:05AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @09:05AM (#390954)

        Kill her now, then yourself. All problems solved.

      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @01:00PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 21 2016, @01:00PM (#391009)

        > would you subject them to living with dementia?

        This is what a health care proxy is for -- you write your own (perhaps with legal help) to tell your family what to do if you are unable to care for yourself. The more detail the easier it will be for your family to follow your wishes.

        Two siblings I know were terribly distraught because their mother was too thoughtless to create a health care proxy. Through some rare fluke, the mother (in her 70s) went quickly from being healthy to being in a non-responsive coma. They went along with the health care system keeping her alive for ~6 weeks, but eventually made the heart rending decision to pull the plug on life support. The siblings may still feel some guilt for "killing their mother"...

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 22 2016, @04:38PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 22 2016, @04:38PM (#391710)

          Just a minor correction, a health care proxy or HP-POA, allows people to make decisions for you, it does not make it so your actual wishes are carried out. In order to do that, you need a separate document called an "Advanced Directive," "Advanced Healthcare Directive," or "Living Will," depending on the particular state you are in.

      • (Score: 2) by Murdoc on Sunday August 21 2016, @05:01PM

        by Murdoc (2518) on Sunday August 21 2016, @05:01PM (#391089) Homepage

        I don't think that we'll be able to accurately answer this question until either a) we develop a cure for it, so we can ask them how bad it actually was (although the question will likely be moot at that point), or b) develop mental telepathy of some kind so someone can take a peek in there to find out. Until then, we're just guessing.

        • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday August 21 2016, @08:34PM

          by darkfeline (1030) on Sunday August 21 2016, @08:34PM (#391209) Homepage

          That's a dangerous line of philosophy to pursue, because how do you know how *anyone* else feels? Maybe everything you do is pissing everyone else off but there's a big conspiracy to keep you out of the loop, and you're living in a fake social bubble.

          Here's a quote from The Grand Design:

          A few years ago the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved goldfish bowls. The measure's sponsor explained the measure in part by saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality? Might not we ourselves be inside some big goldfish bowl and have our vision distorted by an enormous lens? The goldfish's picture of reality is different from ours, but can we be sure it is less real?  

          The goldfish view is not the same as our own, but goldfish could still formulate scientific laws governing the motion of the objects they observe outside their bowl. For example, due to the distortion, a freely moving object that we would observe to move in a straight line would be observed by the goldfish to move along a curved path. Nevertheless, the goldfish could formulate scientific laws from their distorted frame of reference that would always hold true and that would enable them to make predictions about the future motion of objects outside the bowl. Their laws would be more complicated than the laws in our frame, but simplicity is a matter of taste. If a goldfish formulated such a theory, we would have to admit the goldfish's view as a valid picture of reality.

           

          We can only assume, based on how we perceive reality and our own knowledge, that dementia and the expected sense of helplessness that accompanies it is suffering, but it is only so much "guessing" as everything we do and know is "guessing".

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