When people are still being medicated for understandable reactions to a terminal diagnosis of any type of dementia, for responses primarily due to the lack of post diagnostic care, the grief and trauma of the diagnosis, the ongoing neglect, complex and constant grief, over, or under-stimulation, being incarcerated and segregated in a ‘secure dementia unit’, even bullying and family disharmony about what is best for the person with dementia, we are not looking at an epidemic of broken brains.

We are looking at a system that cannot tolerate a persons distress.

The system and the health care professionals are still holding people with dementia to a much higher account than others.

And yes, someone’s needs to keep discussng this topic…

The crisis is not the 60 million people with dementia around the world, or the new diagnosis every 3.2 seconds. 

It is the reflex to pathologise them.

Containment is offered as care.

Compliance is framed as insight.

Side effects are labelled ‘neuropsychiatric symptoms of dementia’ and BPSD.

Trauma, signs of distress and changes in behaviour, are wrongly labelled neuropsychiatric symptoms and BPSD.

This causes harm to the person with dementia.

This causes overmedication, used as chemical restraint, ignoring the Back Box warnings for many of these drugs.

Dementia is then used as the reason for death in cases where the drugs used for chemical restraint have caused it.

The uniforms worn, the stethoscopes, the license to prescribe drugs, are all highly intoxicating, and create serious power imbalances between patints and their families, and health care professionals.

This spills over into how the public also see medicalisation and restraint as the only option to care. It seems easier to accept what the ‘experts’ tell us is best for us, rather than questioning them, especially as western health care professionals are indoctrinated by ‘western medicine’ and most ignore non pharmaceutical and holistic approaches to patient care.

Ask yourself, who would you be most likely to believe, a nurse or doctor with a stethoscope around their neck, or someone else. Naturopaths, integrated health practitioners and others suggesting alternative options to care are ‘discounted’ and often labelled as frauds.

This approach actively ignores our rights, and causes ongoing, and multiple rights violations.

It ignores our right to know that dementia is not only a medical condition, but that it causes acquired multiple cognitive and functional disabilities.

These disabilities are progressive, and could be supported with proactive disability assessment and support, including rehabilitation.

It ignores our right to express normal human responses to distress.

It labels us as if we are the problem.

It ignores the pervasive stigma and discrimination that compounds our distress and changes in behaviour

It ignores the fact that everyone, with and without dementia is changing every single say.

What happens, or rather, does not happen, after diagnosis influences the trajectory of living with dementia into a life of hopelessness.

This is fuelled further by the pervasive ignorance, stigma and discrimination, benevolent othering, therapeutic nihilism and paternalism, not only in the community with in the health care sector.

All of these factors violates so many of our rights, and undermines and annihilates any sense of a future, not just speeding up dependence and loss of mobility but causing hopelessness and adding to our grief.

#SomeonesGottaSayIt