JLN- I agree, to an extent. To a person whose world is becoming inexorably confused and shrinking, I believe that there is that attempt to maintain one's dignity, one's sense of empowerment, one's sense of his control of his world.
It is difficult to separate out how much of the paranoia is adaptive, and how much is a result of the confusion itself. Some of the problem has to do with the loss of short term memory. A person puts something away, and then forgets where it is. The person's conclusion may very well be, especially in a congregate care facility where thievery is not unknown, that someone has taken the item.
When my mom was still living alone, and in her nineties, she had a cleaning lady. This woman was very energetic. At that point my mother's memory was slipping, but cognitively she was not in too bad shape.
My mom showed me where there were scratches on her furniture, all a few inches off the floor. She claimed that the cleaning lady, in her zeal, had been banging the vacuum cleaner into the furniture. I told her to tell the woman to be more careful.
The woman called me, and told me that my mom had a walker that had an exposed nut on the wheel. Apparently, when my mom turned a corner, she leaned to one side, and that was what had been causing the scratches.
I checked, and found that the cleaning lady was absolutely right. I tried the best that I could to explain what had happened to my mother, but she would not be convinced. She could not, or would not believe that she was causing the problem herself.
JLNobody wrote:Wonderful professional attitude, Phoenix. I also think that it's important to enable people to exercise as much control over their lives as possible. And your effort to persuade individuals that it's in their interest to commit themselves is also an effort to induce them to CHOOSE to be committed. And in so doing exercise, or at least feel that they are exercising, a degree of autonomy.
One of the things I've noticed with people in "rest homes" is a kind of low-grade paranoia wherein they suspect everyone of stealing from them. On those occasions when I could determine that this was not so, I concluded that such efforts were actually efforts to retain a sense of one's autonomy and power. Does that sound possible to you?
Here in the apartments, many older persons chronically suspect people of trying to steal from them. Don't know for sure why.
shewolfnm wrote:I posted the idea of racism on the utube clip and people dont seem to like it.
They also dont seem to get it.
But.. eh.. oh well.
There is a white cop that comes in at the end and he seemed to think it was pretty funny. Maybe it's just a cop thing. I hate cops. (most of the time)
Of course you don't get a pension if you're fired. That's why she resigned.
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