As seniors go into twilight years, some of them privately mull ‘rational suicide’

By Melissa Bailey

Ten residents slipped away from their retirement community one Sunday afternoon for a covert meeting in a grocery store cafe. They aimed to answer a taboo question: When they feel they have lived long enough, how can they carry out their own swift and peaceful death?

The seniors, who live in independent apartments at a high-end senior community near Philadelphia, showed no obvious signs of depression. They’re in their 70s and 80s and say they don’t intend to end their lives soon. But they say they want the option to take “preemptive action” before their health declines in their later years, particularly because of dementia.

More seniors are weighing the possibility of suicide, experts say, as the baby boomer generation — known for valuing autonomy and self-determination — reaches older age at a time when modern medicine can keep human bodies alive far longer than ever.

The group gathered a few months ago to meet with Dena Davis, a bioethics professor at Lehigh University who defends “rational suicide” — the idea that suicide can be a well-reasoned decision, not a result of emotional or psychological problems. Davis, 72, has been vocal about her desire to end her life rather than experience a slow decline because of dementia, as her mother did.

he concept of rational suicide is highly controversial; it runs counter to many societal norms, religious and moral convictions, and the efforts of suicide prevention workers who contend that every life is worth saving.

“The concern that I have at a social level is if we all agree that killing yourself is an acceptable, appropriate way to go, then there becomes a social norm around that, and it becomes easier to do, more common,” said Yeates Conwell, a psychiatrist specializing in geriatrics at the University of Rochester and a leading expert in elderly suicide. That’s particularly dangerous with older adults because of widespread ageist attitudes, he said.

As a society, we have a responsibility to care for people as they age, Conwell argued. Promoting rational suicide “creates the risk of a sense of obligation for older people to use that method rather than advocate for better care that addresses their concerns in other ways.”

A Kaiser Health News investigation in April found that older Americans — a few hundred per year, at least — are killing themselves while living in or transitioning to long-term care. Many cases KHN reviewed involved depression or mental illness. What’s not clear is how many of these suicides involve clear-minded people exercising what Davis would call a rational choice.

Suicide prevention experts contend that while it’s normal to think about death as we age, suicidal ideation is a sign that people need help. They argue that all suicides should be avoided by addressing mental health and helping seniors live a rich and fulfilling life.

But to Lois, the 86-year-old woman who organized the meeting outside Philadelphia, suicides by older Americans are not all tragedies. A widow with no children, Lois said she would rather end her own life than deteriorate slowly over seven years, as her mother did after she broke a hip at age 90. (Lois asked to be referred to by only her middle name so she would not be identified, given the sensitive topic.) In eight years living at her retirement community, Lois has encountered other residents who feel similarly about suicide. But because of stigma, she said, the conversations are usually kept quiet.

Lois insisted her group meet off-campus at Wegmans because of the “subversive” nature of the discussion. Supporting rational suicide, she said, clashes with the ethos of their continuing care retirement community, where seniors transition from independent apartments to assisted living to a nursing home as they age.

Seniors pay six figures to move into the bucolic campus, which includes an indoor heated pool, a concert hall and many acres of wooded trails. They are guaranteed housing, medical care, companionship and comfort for the rest of their lives.

“ We are saying, thank you very much, but that’s not what we’re looking for,” Lois said of her group.

Carolyn, a 72-year-old member of the group who also asked that her last name be withheld, said they live in a “fabulous place” where residents enjoy “a lot of agency.” But she and her 88-year-old husband also want the freedom to determine how they die.

A retired nurse, Carolyn said her views have been shaped in part by her experience with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In the 1990s, she created a program that sent hospice volunteers to work with people dying of AIDS, which at the time was a death sentence.

She said many of the men kept a stockpile of lethal drugs on a dresser or bedside table. They would tell her, “When I’m ready, that’s what I’m going to do.” But as their condition grew worse, she said, they became too confused to follow through.

“I just saw so many people who were planning to have that quiet, peaceful ending when it came, and it just never came. The pills just got scattered. They lost the moment” when they had the wherewithal to end their own lives, she said.

Carolyn emphasized that she and her husband do not feel suicidal, nor do they have a specific plan to die on a certain date. But she said while she still has the ability, she wants to procure a lethal medication that would offer the option for a peaceful end in the future.

“Ideally, I would have in hand the pill, or the liquid or the injection,” she said.

New Jersey recently became the eighth state to allow medical aid in dying, which permits some patients to get a doctor’s prescription for lethal drugs. That method is restricted, however, to people with a terminal condition who are mentally competent and expected to die within six months

Patients who aren’t eligible for those laws would have to go to an “underground practice” to get lethal medication, said Timothy Quill, a palliative care physician at the University of Rochester School of Medicine. Quill became famous in the 1990s for publicly admitting that he gave a 45-year-old patient with leukemia sleeping pills so she could end her life. He said he has done so with only one other patient.

Quill said he considers suicide one option he may choose as he ages: “I would probably be a classic [case] — I’m used to being in charge of my life.” He said he might be able to adapt to a situation in which he became entirely dependent on the care of others, “but I’d like to be able to make that be a choice as opposed to a necessity.”

Suicide could be as rational a choice as a patient’s decision to end dialysis, after which they typically die within two weeks, he said. But when patients bring up suicide, he said, it should launch a serious conversation about what would make their life feel meaningful and their preferences for medical care at the end of life.

Clinicians have little training on how to handle conversations about rational suicide, said Meera Balasubramaniam, a geriatric psychiatrist at New York University School of Medicine who has written about the topic. She said her views are “evolving” on whether suicide by older adults who are not terminally ill can be a rational choice.

“One school of thought is that even mentioning the idea that this could be rational is an ageist concept,” she said. “It’s an important point to consider. But ignoring it and not talking about it also does not do our patients a favor, who are already talking about this or discussing this among themselves.”

In her discussions with patients, she said, she explores their fears about aging and dying and tries to offer hope and affirm the value of their life.

Conwell, the suicide prevention expert, said these conversations matter because “the balance between the wish to die and the wish to live is a dynamic one that shifts frequently, moment to moment, week to week.”

Carolyn, who has three children and four grandchildren, said conversations about suicide are often kept quiet for fear that involving a family member would implicate them in a crime. The seniors also don’t want to get their retirement community in trouble.

In some of the cases KHN reviewed, nursing homes have faced federal fines of up to tens of thousands of dollars for failing to prevent suicides on-site.

There’s “also just this hush-hush atmosphere of our culture,” Carolyn said. “Not wanting to deal with judgment — of others, or offend someone because they have different beliefs. It makes it hard to have open conversations.”

Carolyn said when she and her neighbors met at the cafe, she felt comforted by breaking the taboo.

“The most wonderful thing about it was being around a table with people that I knew where we could talk about it, and realize that we’re not alone,” Carolyn said. “To share our fears — like if we choose to use something, and it doesn’t quite do the job, and you’re comatose or impaired.”

At the meeting, many questions were practical, Lois said.

“We only get one crack at it,” Lois said. “Everyone wants to know what to do.”

Davis said she did not have practical answers. Her expertise lies in ethics, not the means.

Public opinion research has shown shifting opinions among doctors and the general public about hastening death. Nationally, 72 percent of Americans believe that doctors should be allowed by law to end a terminally ill patient’s life if the patient and his or her family request it, according to a 2018 Gallup poll.

Lois said she’s seeing societal attitudes begin to shift about rational suicide, which she sees as the outgrowth of a movement toward patient autonomy. Davis said she’d like to see polling on how many people share that opinion nationwide.

“It seems to me that there must be an awful lot of people in America who think the way I do,” Davis said. “Our beliefs are not respected. Nobody says, ‘Okay, how do we respect and facilitate the beliefs of somebody who wants to commit suicide rather than having dementia?’ ”

If you or someone you know has talked about contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255, or use the online Lifeline Crisis Chat, both available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. People 60 and older can call the Institute on Aging’s 24-hour, toll-free Friendship Line at 800-971-0016. IOA also makes ongoing outreach calls to lonely older adults.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

May 25, 2019May 25, 2019

‘A good death’

Nurse pioneers a better way for elders to die

Nurse practitioner Nikki Johnston has been awarded the inaugural Health Minister’s Award for Nursing Trailblazers.

By Steve Evans

Nikki Johnston is passionate about dying.

She’s just won a big prize as Australia’s most innovative nurse. It was a recognition of the way she is changing the way the elderly end their lives.

Her mission as a nurse in Canberra is to help people have what she calls “a good death”.

She says too many people have “bad deaths” where fear and loneliness dominate their last moments.

Her radical idea is to involve people who are in their last months in the planning for those final fearful moments. The dying attend meetings where their own deaths are discussed.

She says a rigorous study of the results of the new system demonstrates clearly that it is a better way, and she’s pressing politicians to adopt it in the rest of Australia and beyond.

She also thinks there is too much emphasis on research to prolong lives at the expense of spending more to ensure that people die in peace at the right age.

Ms Johnston is a “nurse practitioner” who works in palliative care – it’s the most senior type of nurse, qualified to diagnose illnesses and prescribe drugs and treatments.

She has a missionary zeal for involving the patient in (arguably) the most important process affecting them – their end.

In the residential homes where the system is now used, the dying person attends the meetings and hears how their death will be dealt with. Their views are listened to and acted on.

“If we don’t ask the questions and give people the opportunity to talk about the end of life, we risk isolating people in their last months,” she says.

“They feel like no one gets it – no one understands – what’s going on, and that can be frightening.”

Researchers have studied 1700 people in the ACT at the end of their lives, comparing those where the system is in operation and those where it is not.

The study – the first of its kind in the world – involved rigorous measurement of a raft of variables like how soundly people slept in their last months and how much medication they needed.

The researchers devised a “quality of death” index. Ms Johnston says the results show that the new way works.

She argues that there should be a switch from maintaining uncomfortable and painful lives to the quality of death. “People are living longer but their quality of life is reduced so they are not living well enough or dying well enough,” she says.

“We are not valuing the end of life because we are not putting money into it.”

With the new system, people aren’t told bluntly that they are dying.

Ms Johnston says that she might have a conversation with a resident of an aged care home and ask them how they saw their future. In that conversation, the old person might well say that they thought they were dying.

“I ask them where they are at, what’s important, and most people tell me they are dying,” Ms Johnston says.

“If they are leading this conversation, It’s not confronting. They have taken us there.”

“Gently, we normalise death and dying. We help the staff to be able to talk about it. We support the relatives and loved ones through the process.”

She said that the elderly people she deals with generally don’t fear death. “Most people are ready. They are sick and they’ve had enough. They are ready to go.

“To help someone in their last months of life, we need to know them – to sit with them and talk to them. We need to know what’s important. How do we get this right for the person?”

That is what happened, for example, with Chris Dillon, whose death on March 29, 2017 was peaceful, according to her daughter Rose.

The aged mother had been in a residential home in Ainslie for just over two years.

According to her daughter, Mrs Dillon said one day that she felt tired and she was close to the end of her life.

Once that was recognised, the palliative care team became involved.

“She was a pragmatic person,” Rose says.

“She wanted to know what it would feel like, would it hurt, how would people know that she was dying. What would they do with her body?

“And then Nikki came along. She sat down really close to Mum and said: ‘I’m Nikki. I’m from palliative care and we need to talk about some things’.”

According to Rose, her mother simply replied: “What? About me dying?”

“So the conversation started naturally,” she says.

“The impact that Nikki had on Mum’s death was massive. It allowed Mum to have a peaceful death.

“She wasn’t frightened.”

The new system involves staff keeping a kind eye on residents

At the Calvary Haydon Retirement Community in Bruce, for example, manager Kim McGovern says she and her staff quietly look at residents every month to see “who might not be there next month”.

Kim McGovern of Calvary Haydon Retirement Community in Canberra.

Once people are identified, they are talked to sensitively.

An “individual care plan” is drawn up with the involvement of the resident.

“It’s their choice. We involve them early on,” Ms McGovern says. “It’s their last journey.”

The involvement of the dying person allows proper preparation, both medically and emotionally.

This means a final crisis, in which the patient is rushed to hospital to die in a chaotic emergency, is less likely.

Ms Johnston is an extraordinary character – bright and vivacious (at least when she’s expounding on the importance of helping people have “a good death”).

She may have dark moods, in that she says she needs to put her “armour” on before she attends some deathbeds.

And she does cry – after all, she’s got to know the person – but, as she puts it, “this isn’t my grief”.

“The grief belongs to the family,” she says.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

May 13, 2019May 13, 2019

Comparatively few African Americans make end of life plans

By Glenn Ellis

The entire lifespan of most African Americans is consumed by efforts to overcome obstacles, inequality, and in many cases, institutional racism.

The most difficult point in this most tiring journey is often the end-of-life. For the disproportionate number of us is when death is accompanied by the dilemmas around how we choose to die.

Hospice; Palliative Care; Advance Directives; and Compet-ency become terms that we, or our loved ones, all of a sudden are faced with and expected to deal with.

Studies and observations show that, likewise disproportionately, we are not prepared for this final stage of life.

What we know is that African Americans are less likely than any other group to be prepared for end-of-life, and not surprisingly, are less likely to have a prepared Advance directive.

First, let’s talk about Advanced Directives. This is the document that should be prepared to outline, in detail, what type of care (if any) we desire as our lives come to an end, and we are not able to make decisions for ourselves.

An Advanced Directive includes things that typically are not even thought about during times when life is good.

Generally, it will include things such as a living will or do-not-resuscitate order, or in identification of a health care surrogate. Regrettably, it’s not until we are in a hospital ICU; Hospice Center; or even on Home Hospice that we (or our loved ones) are confronted with having to make difficult decisions, while dealing with imminent death.

In spite of the fact that studies show that 80 percent of Americans would prefer to die at home, the reality is that 60 percent of us will die in a hospital; 20 percent of us will die in a nursing home; and only 20 percent will end up in a situation where we will be able to make our transition in the comfort and peace of our own home.

If you are not competent, or capable, to make medical decisions but do not have an advance directive, or it is unavailable when needed, decisions will nevertheless have to be made.

In 2013, The Pew Foundation did a study and found that while 73 percent of all Americans have given “some thought” to end-of-life, only 37 percent of African Americans have done the same. This means that doctors and others on the care team of a terminally-ill patient may decide to continue providing care and treatment, when you may feel that your loved one has had enough, and should be allowed to die in peace, with dignity. In the absence of an Advance Directive, this could become a point of contention, and the patient is caught in the middle. Or, it could be the other way around, you may feel that there is still hope for a recovery, and the doctors feel that there isn’t. Again, the patient lies there in limbo, and often suffering unnecessarily. For African Americans, it’s worse. One study found that only 13 percent of all African Americans have an Advance Directive in place.

It can be a difficult, and often, an uncomfortable conversation, but collectively, we have to begin to have conversations during the “good” times in life with our families and loved ones about what we do and don’t want should we ever find ourselves in a position where we are unable to make medical decisions for ourselves.

Think about how often we attend funerals, and families are still reeling over how things came to an end with conflict and contention between families of a patient who died, and the medical staff at the hospital. Think about how different it would be if we made our wishes known, before something happened unexpectedly.

A few things that may be helpful for you in getting an Advance Directive for yourself:

First you need to familiarize yourself with the term: life-sustaining treatments. Nolo’s Plain-English Law Dictionary defines this as “Medical procedures that would only prolong the process of dying or sustain a condition of permanent unconsciousness. A patient who is receiving life-sustaining treatment will die soon, whether or not treatment is administered. Life-sustaining treatment may include a respirator, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), dialysis, surgery, and other medical procedures.” Would you want any of these? If so, under what circumstances?

Most importantly, let your loved ones know what you have in your Advance Directive. People only like surprises for their birthdays. Don’t wait for them to find out at an emotionally difficult time, when they are grappling with the inevitability of your death.

You don’t need a lawyer to create your Advance Directive. But you do need to make sure you understand the laws of the state you live in regarding Advance Directives. Some states have restrictions that you need to be aware of that may prohibit your wishes.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

May 8, 2019May 8, 2019

How Doctors Tell Patients They’re Dying

When Clyde Earle checked into a hospital expecting to return home, his doctor, Kathy Selvaggi, had to deliver some bad news. Our film “Being Mortal” explores issues of death, aging, and what is important in the last days of life.

February 10, 2019February 10, 2019

How to die the way you want

Tackling the tough questions over a cup of tea or coffee

By Randi Hutter Epstein

We’re all dying, every one of us.

But we learn early on that despite the fact our lives are universally finite, most people don’t want to talk about it.

We’ll talk sex, we’ll talk drugs, we’ll even talk money—but not death.

That could be changing with the proliferation of so-called Death Cafes, informal get-togethers in cities across America, Europe and Asia, where people eat a little something, drink some coffee maybe and talk about, well, the inevitable.

The mission is to revamp typically depressing and urgent end-of-life discussions to more leisurely “Everything-I-Wanted-To-Know-About-Death-But-Was-Afraid-To-Ask.”

The conversation ranges, and depends on the group of people who’ve gathered: anything from how much a funeral costs to the details of a “green” funeral (think: corpse as compost) to tips on how to talk to your family members about your own funeral.

There’s a range of people who attend, too, from someone who had a death in the family and wants to be better prepared next time, to health care providers who want a different perspective on dealing with death. They range in age from 20-somethings to 90-somethings.

The object: to turn death from a feared end to something that is part of life.

“Death Cafés change the way you live in the most profound and wonderful way,” says Kim Mooney, 67, who runs monthly meetings in Longmont, Colorado.

Mooney even held a few events in a mortuary. “I like to say it’s the only time you will walk in and walk out of one, so you might as well take advantage of it.”

Death café hosts tend to have a sense of humor.

Death on twitter

If you want to confirm the popularity of the death positive movement, just go on social media. There’s The Death Café Facebook group, which lists times and dates of meeting and has more than 50,000 likes and followers.

Or you could follow Death Café on Twitter.

Advocates say the meetings allow people a low-pressure way to express fears about the Great Unknown; to chat about the way other cultures handle death; and to share practical information, such as learning the nuts and bolts of filling out end-of-life forms.

Talking with strangers, hosts say, is often an easier way to broach the topic before launching a conversation about death with loved ones.

Lizzy Miles is a hospice social worker who hosted America’s first café in 2012 in Westerville, Ohio. She baked cookies in the shape of tombstones with grey icing and “Death Café” where the epitaph normally goes.

She is one of more than a 100 Death Café hosts in this country. She’s still hosting—and still making treats—for nearly a dozen people who show up each month.

Yes, these are the cookies Lizzy makes for her Death Café guests in Ohio.

“No one ever comes to a Death Café already uncomfortable talking about death,” she says. “If you are, you’re not going to come. We have a lot of sandwich generation people, who are taking care of their parents.”

Miles is so committed she even traveled to a Death Café in Hong Kong—“on my own dime!”—to see what it was like.

“It was amazing, people were speaking English and Mandarin and Cantonese,” she says. “And I thought ‘Oh my gosh, all these different languages. This is pretty cool but almost exactly the same.’”

Dos and don’ts

Anyone can be a host, but there are guidelines. The Death Café website has a set of guidelines and Miles herself was a co-author on an article that included a list of dos and don’ts in the Omega Journal of Death and Dying:

Do: Allow a space for folks to share their ideas respectfully and openly.

Do: Offer the opportunity for everyone to speak but allow those who want to remain silent to do so.

Don’t: Charge an admission fee.

Don’t: Sell death-related products.

Don’t: Turn the group into grief support.

Miles and others believe that confronting our mortality will prompt us to the make the sorts of life changes that some folks do only when confronted with a fatal disease. Why wait?

Shellie Balogh, a 61-year-old hospice nurse attended one of Miles’ cafés in Ohio.

“It wasn’t what I expected; it was more upbeat,” she says. “It’s a fun thing to do if I have a free Saturday. You go and meet people you may never see again and just have this conversation, opening up this forbidden area of discussion.”

A midwife for dying

Suzanne O’Brien hosts a New York City group that meets at a public library on the Upper West side. She’s a nurse turned death doula.

Death doulas—part of this burgeoning “death-positive” movement—provide the same sort of bedside care, comfort and companionship that birth doulas offer to pregnant women but at the other end of the life cycle.

O’Brien said monthly conversations tend to fit into five buckets, sometimes all five covered in one 90-minute session:

The physical: How do I make sure I’m comfortable during my dying hours. What do I want to happen to my body?

The financial: What forms do I need to fill out? Or how much money do I want to spend on a funeral versus, say, end-of-life care?

The emotional: How do we deal with potential regrets or forgiveness?

The mental: Reasoning and acceptance

The spiritual: How do beliefs about death inform the way we live.

One woman wanted to know how to donate her body to a medical school anatomy class. She also wanted to make sure her family would not be given the leftovers when the students are done picking her apart, something she had heard can happen.

She told the group: “I’d rather just be flushed.”

Banishing the secrecy

The idea of a group of a random community members chatting about death over refreshments was the brainchild of Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz. He launched a “Café Mortel” in 2004 in the lakeside town of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. A dozen mortal members attended.

The point, as he once told a reporter for the Independent, a British newspaper, was to remove death talk from its “tyrannical secrecy.”

The first cafe outside of Switzerland was held by John Underwood, who hosted in his London basement in 2011. He’s given credit for helping the movement go global; he died last year, at the age of 44, from undiagnosed leukemia.

Today, there are death-with-food meetings in about 55 countries—including the U.K., Italy, Hong Kong, Finland, the Netherlands and New Zealand.

Becoming a regular

Those who are regulars say that while the subject matter is death, the meetings are not sad. Hosts emphasize that they are not grief support groups, more death-curious groups.

Jane Geller, a retired schoolteacher in New York City attends the Upper West Side meeting nearly every month.

“It’s a misnomer to think it’s depressing,” she said. “Death Cafés are really about life.”

Shatzi Weisberger, an 88-year-old retired nurse from New York City is a regular, too.

“I was always especially interested in how we come into this world and how we leave it. When I got into my eighties, I got personally interested for my own edification.”

Last fall, she hosted her own “FUN-eral” (pronounced Funn-eral) in the common room of her apartment building. More than 100 attendees came to the event. It sounded like a macrabe-themed birthday but she said it was a death, not a birth, party. And a way to attend her own funeral.

She said she has planned her own green burial. “I’m going to be wrapped in a shroud and buried in the woods upstate and my body will deteriorate and something will grow. I don’t know if it will be grass or flowers or a tree so I feel my dying is bringing life into the world. That’s not depressing at all.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

November 5, 2018November 5, 2018

People with dementia and financial abuse

– the warning signs and how to avoid it

By Clarissa Giebel

When most of us go online to our internet banking account and set up a direct debit to pay a bill, we probably do it swiftly without much thought. But in reality it’s not that easy. In fact, there are a lot of complex processes involved in how we manage our finances, which older people, especially those with dementia, often struggle to deal with.

Dementia affects an estimated 850,000 in the UK, with numbers expected to rise to over a million in the next few years. Each year, dementia care is costing £26.3 billion in the UK alone. Most of this involves care in nursing homes and supporting people with dementia with their daily activities.

If we look at the whole raft of daily activities a person does, such as preparing a hot drink or a meal, or doing the laundry, financial management is one of the earliest tasks to deteriorate in dementia. These processes are complex, which is why people with dementia often struggle to count change, use a cash machine, pay bills or manage tax records sometimes even before their diagnosis.

Daily activities as a whole are often underpinned by a complex network of cognition. This can include different types of memory for past and future events, so the need to remember to do a task at 8pm tonight for example, involves problem solving skills, and attention. But there are other factors that can hinder someone when performing a task, such as motor problems or their environment.

Warning signs

In a recent analysis of a large data set collected from 34 clinical centres across the US, my colleagues and I looked at what kinds of behaviour are a warning sign for problems with paying bills and managing taxes in people with dementia.

When we obtained the data set, we only looked at people with dementia living in the community, who also had a family caregiver, and a diagnosis of the three dementia subtypes: Alzheimer’s disease, behavioural-variant fronto-temporal dementia, and Lewy body dementia. We then performed an analysis using statistical models to help identify the degree to which certain factors – such as language or motor skills – can predict a particular outcome. In this case, paying bills was the outcome for one model, and managing taxes was the outcome for the second model.

We found that between 11% and 14% of the ability to manage those financial tasks is predicted by executive functioning, or problem solving skills, language, and motor problems. So this means, if a person has problems solving difficult tasks, problems with language, they fall frequently and are moving slowly, and are also more likely to also struggle with financial tasks. Slowness and falls are particularly prominent in people with Lewy body dementia, which is different to Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia.

Get prepared

This knowledge can help people with dementia. Older people, including people with dementia, can often be subject to financial exploitation. This can be through online or telephone scamming, or knocking on someone’s door trying to sell something. And when people with dementia struggle using internet or telephone banking, they may be more prone to telling strangers their bank details.

A helping hand is needed for those living with dementia to manage their finances.

One way to support people in managing their finances may be to provide training to improve their cognition. It’s important to bear in mind that dementia is neurodegenerative. So while we can help people maintain certain skills for longer, there will come a point where full support for finance tasks is needed. This could involve arranging a lasting power of attorney and naming a person that is trusted to look after financial decisions.

Another way may be to adapt the homes of people with dementia to avoid falls and allow them to move around more freely. In our analysis, we found that falls were linked to poor finance management, meaning that noticing your loved one fall more frequently than usual could be a warning sign that they may also struggle managing their finances. If we can drag out the need for full support for as long as possible, we can help someone stay in their own home for longer. And that is exactly where people feel the happiest.

Other, larger financial questions loom for people with dementia, such as inheritance and dealing with payments for formal care – both at home and in future in a nursing home. These are big financial concerns, which should be discussed once a diagnosis is made, but ideally done before. That way the person is better able to judge what they think should be done with their money, and is less likely to be financially exploited than in the later stages of the condition. The Alzheimer’s Society has also produced some good further guidelines on how to deal with financial abuse in dementia.

While it may be the last thing someone wants to think about who has just received a diagnosis, the best way to avoid financial abuse is to put things in place right away. If that isn’t motivation enough, staying independent in all sorts of activities improves well-being. And that is our ultimate goal, whether we have dementia or not.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

October 17, 2018October 17, 2018

Spotting Elder Abuse: Tips for Long-Distance Caregivers

From a distance, it can be hard to assess the quality of your family member’s caregivers. Ideally, if there is a primary caregiver on the scene, he or she can keep tabs on how things are going.

Perhaps you have already identified friends or neighbors who can stop in unannounced to be your eyes and ears. Sometimes, a geriatric care manager can help.

You can stay in touch with your family member by phone and take note of any comments or mood changes that might indicate neglect or mistreatment. These can happen in any setting, at any socioeconomic level. Abuse can take many forms, including domestic violence, emotional abuse, financial abuse, theft, and neglect.

Sometimes the abuser is a hired caregiver, but he or she can also be someone familiar. Stress can take a toll when adult children are caring for aging parents, or when an older person is caring for an aging spouse or sibling. In some families, abuse continues a long-standing family pattern. In others, the older adult’s need for constant care can cause a caregiver to lash out verbally or physically. In some cases, especially in the middle to late stages of Alzheimer’s disease, the older adult may become difficult to manage and physically aggressive, causing harm to the caregiver. This might cause a caregiver to respond angrily.

But no matter who is the abuser or what is the cause, abuse and neglect are never acceptable responses. If you feel that your family member is in physical danger, contact the authorities right away. If you suspect abuse, but do not feel there is an immediate risk, talk to someone who can act on your behalf: your parent’s doctor, for instance, or your contact at a home health agency. Suspected abuse must be reported to adult protective services.