This diary is about untreated dementia and Alzheimers; the title is merely evocative of the situation. I suppose it comes as no surprise to anyone here that mental health services in this country are basically non-existent. Sandy Hook, Aurora, Columbine, the Albuquerque Police Department shootings and other tragedies we’ve seen pretty much prove that nobody is doing much about monitoring and treating the increasing numbers of mentally-impaired people roaming America.
I live in northern Washington state – a place you’d think was pretty progressive and responsive to the changing needs of our society and the pressures that shape it. Liberal, progressive, intelligent Washington state. Yet when it comes to seeking mental health assistance, or even concerns about someone who may be developing problems, I may as well be living in backwoods Mississippi.
One of my neighbors has, I’m convinced, early stage dementia. It’s tricky to spot, the signs are so subtle, but if you’ve lived with a parent who developed dementia over 20 years, if you’ve been friends with someone who also went down that path, you one day get a single clue that suddenly makes a lot of annoying and irritating – even inexplicable – behavior into a pattern that is instantly recognizable as dementia.
I’m not going into the details and circumstances of my conclusion, nor do I claim to be absolutely correct in my theory. But what I do want to say is how incredibly frustrating and fruitless it is to try and find some government or non-profit agency that will offer help and possibly an evaluation of this guy to find out if he is indeed sick. Because he has no friends or living relatives, which are the avenues by which the other dementia sufferers I knew were guided to help.
The police are no help. The landlord apparently has less rights than his tenant in what actions are allowed (see the movie Pacific Heights if you want to see the insanity of such legal policy). The free clinic won’t get involved, the senior services organization has no resources to cope with this, the public health department says “not our problem”, and on and on. I get rejections, phone number references that lead to more negative results … if America’s physical health system is broken, then its mental health system is completely disintegrated.
So I just have to hope for, what, a miracle remission? This guy owns both a car and a gun. His actions can be quite bizarre, even threatening. He has no empathy for anyone – he will leave for the day and leave his sound system blasting at high volume while he’s gone, mainly because he doesn’t like the tenants above him. Can the police or landlord prevent him from doing this? Nope, violates his “civil rights”, they say. WTF? What about MY civil rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
We’ve just had three and a half days of rain that cleared up about noon today. So now he’s out there washing his car. Like he does every 2 or 3 days. Seen in momentary glimpses, this guy seems as normal as can be. Which is why the police and the landlord are not helpful here. But the patterns are there, the brief delusional episodes, that show something definitely is not right with this guy.
So he’s on fire and there’s no fire department to put out the flames. I’m not going to move away; I live at the other end of the building and avoid him like the plague. But I wonder if someday he just drives his car into a crowd of kids at a bus stop or puts 4 or 5 bullets into a guy walking his dog down the alley, if that will be the only time anybody anywhere will finally come to help.