Illness
Dementia Turned Me into an Elder Abuser
I wasn’t me
Perhaps other children have had similar experiences with their parents who suffer or are suffering from Alzheimer’s or another form of dementia. Your parent may be the patient who now has to cope with an insidious disease, but you as the child of that parent have to cope with your reaction.
My reaction was far from simple, but then dementia manifests itself in different stages and perhaps is idiosyncratic, being somewhat unique to the individual. At the beginning of my mother’s illness, she was quite verbal and mobile. She cursed, prayed, and rattled on about a variety of thoughts streaming through her brain.
She was difficult because she didn’t always understand what was going on in real time, and she’d agree to something, then refuse to do it. This was the problem that faced me when my mother’s dementia was fully expressed but not treated with any drugs or behavioral therapy. Her problem was the one that will forever torment me since it transformed me into someone accused of elder abuse.
I need to preface this anecdote with the statement that in no way did I ever consider myself to be an elder abuser. At times even when my mother was healthy, I could be sarcastic, sassy, and nasty, but the context gave rise to my verbal abuse. For instance…
