Elderly abuse, psychiatry abusing seniors

https://www.mental-health-abuse.org/elderlyAbuse8.html

“To psychiatrists old age is a ‘mental disorder,’ a for profit ‘disease’ for which they have no cure, but for which they will happily supply endless prescriptions of psychoactive drugs or damaging electroshock treatment.”
— Jan Eastgate President, Citizens Commission on Human Rights International

It’s not just the young that may fall victim to abuse in our society, but the elderly as well.

In the 1980s, my grandmother who was nearing 100 had the misfortune of being placed in a nursing home. At first, everything seemed all right and she was praised for being a model patient until there was a great upset in her life. Her daughter, my aunt, had died. I don’t know the details, but I do remember being told at one point that my grandmother had to be put in restraints and was being prescribed Haldol. Please understand that this is happening to my grandmother who’s 99 years old.

Not only was it appalling that they would do something like this to someone who was so old and frail, but to be given a psychiatric drug was so out of character for her, I couldn’t understand it. HALDOL??, I asked, but isn’t that a neuroleptic prescribed to psychotics? She’s NOT psychotic! Someone in my family said, well, maybe she turned psychotic. And I said – WHAT ?!! She’s one of the most sensible, emotionally balanced women I know. She’s survived great hardships and surmounted many obstacles, and you mean to tell me she suddenly turned psychotic at age 99? What BS! 

What I imagined happening to my daily chagrin was that she probably couldn’t communicate something very important to her in English or French  (her English was broken, her French non-existant) and because of some misunderstanding and lack of patience and tolerance on the part of the staff, and some arrogant assumption on the part of some ‘professional’ , was sedated on this very powerful drug. She was already frail to begin with, but she weakened considerably more once she was on the drug, to the point of having to be spoon-fed, and then fed with a tube. She died some months later.

You may be wondering how something like this can happen. I think more people would speak out, but when it’s coming from some trusted authority, from some establishment like a nursing home, you tend to deny to yourself any abuse that’s going on, or you just tell yourself that that’s the way things are. I wasn’t doing any of that at the time, but I had no say. No one was listening to me. 

If we all had that attitude, there would be far more abuse going on in the world. Fortunately, a few brave souls speak out from time to time, exposing uncomfortable truths. And you can be sure they’ll be dismissed or discredited when they do. That’s a given. But eventually we open our eyes, and our hearts and minds to what these people are saying. Or life does it for us.                        

https://www.mental-health-abuse.org/elderlyAbuse1.html

INTRODUCTION Preying on the Elderly

In today’s high-pressure world, tradition is too often replaced by more “modern” means of dealing with the demands of life. For example, while once heavily community-, church- and family-based, today the task of caring for our parents and grandparents routinely falls to organizations such as nursing homes or aged-care centers. There we trust that professionally trained staff will take care of our elders as we would.

Doubtless, 67-year-old Pierre Charbonneau’s wife and family felt this way when he was rushed to a hospital suffering from a severe anxiety attack reportedly related to Alzheimer’s disease. Displaying “acute agitation,” Pierre was prescribed a tranquilizer. Ten days later he was transferred to a nursing home where the drug dosage was immediately doubled, and then tripled three days after that. Shortly after, his wife, Lucette, found him bent over in his wheelchair with his chin touching his chest, unable to walk and capable of swallowing only a few teaspoons of puréed food.

A pharmacist warned Lucette that her husband was possibly suffering irreversible nervous system damage caused by major tranquilizers. The family called the nursing home and requested that the drugs be stopped. It was too late. Mr. Charbonneau’s tongue was permanently paralyzed, a doctor later explained, and he would never regain his ability to swallow. Nine days later, Mr. Charbonneau died. The cause of death was listed as a heart attack.

For those who contemplate how to arrange care for much-loved and aging parents or grandparents, it is vital to know that this tragic story is not an exception in elder care today.

When Wilda Henry took her 83-year-old mother, Cecile, to a nursing home, “she walked in the place as good as you and I could.” Within two weeks, after being prescribed the psychiatric drug Haldol, Cecile began babbling instead of talking, drooling constantly, shaking violently and was unable to control her bowels. The dose, it was later discovered, had been increased to 100 times the recommended amount. A medical doctor determined that excessive use of Haldol had caused these symptoms as well as permanent liver damage.

The reality of nursing home and aged-care center life today is often far from the stylized image of communicative, interactive and interested elderly residents living in an idyllic environment. By contrast, more often than not, the institutionalized elderly of today appear submissive, quiet, somehow vacant, a sort of lifelessness about them, perhaps blankly staring or deeply introspective and withdrawn. If not by drugs, these conditions can also be brought on by the use of electroconvulsive or shock treatment (ECT) or simply the threat of painful and demeaning restraints.

Rather than this being the failure of nursing hospital and aged care staff generally, this is the legacy of the widespread introduction of psychiatric treatment into the care of the elderly over the last few decades.

Consider the following facts about the “treatments” they receive:

Tranquilizers, also known as benzodiazepines, can be addictive after 14 days of use.

In Canada, between 1995 and March 1996, 428,000 prescriptions for one particular, highly addictive tranquilizer were written, with more than 35% of these for patients 65 and older.

In Australia, a study found one third of elderly people were prescribed tranquilizers and another found that the elderly were prescribed psychoactive drugs in nursing homes because they were being “noisy,” “wanting to leave the nursing home” or were “pacing.”

Data from coroners’ reports compiled by Britain’s Home Office showed benzodiazepines as a more frequently contributing factor to causes of unnatural death each year than cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, and all other illegal drugs.

While nations wage a war on cocaine, heroin and other street drugs, roughly one in five seniors in the United States struggles with a different kind of substance abuse— prescribed psychoactive drugs.

In the United States, 65-year-olds receive 360% more shock treatment than 64-year-olds because at age 65 government insurance coverage for shock typically takes effect. Such extensive abuse of the elderly is not the result of medical incompetence. In fact, medical literature clearly cautions against prescribing tranquilizers to the elderly because of the numerous dangerous side effects. Studies show ECT shortens the lives of elderly people significantly. Specific figures are not kept as causes of death are usually listed as heart attacks or other conditions.

The abuse is the result of psychiatry maneuvering itself into an authoritative position over aged care. From there, psychiatry has broadly perpetrated the tragic but lucrative hoax that aging is a mental disorder requiring extensive and expensive psychiatric services.

The end result is that, rather than being cherished and respected, too often our senior citizens suffer the extreme indignity of having their power of mind heartlessly nullified by psychiatric treatments or their lives simply brought to a tragic and premature end.

This publication is being presented to expose the harsh reality that such tragedies are repeated quietly and frequently in aged-care facilities all over the world. Such betrayal of the elderly and their loved ones must not be tolerated in a civilized society.

Sincerely,

Jan Eastgate President,
Citizens Commission on Human Rights International