In today’s high–pressure world, tradition is too often replaced by more “modern†means of dealing with the demands of life. For example, while once heavily community–, church– and family–based, today the task of caring for our parents and grandparents routinely falls to organizations such as nursing homes or aged–care centers. There we trust that professionally trained staff will take care of our elders as we would.
For those who contemplate how to arrange care for much–loved and aging parents or grandparents, it is vital to know that psychiatry abusing seniors with cruel mental health programs is not an exception in elder care today.
The reality of nursing home and aged–care center life today is often far from the stylized image of communicative, interactive and interested elderly residents living in an idyllic environment. By contrast, more often than not, the institutionalized elderly of today appear submissive, quiet, somehow vacant, a sort of lifelessness about them, perhaps blankly staring or deeply introspective and withdrawn.
If not by drugs, these conditions can also be brought on by the use of electroconvulsive or shock treatment (ECT) or simply the threat of painful and demeaning restraints.
Rather than this being the failure of nursing hospital and aged care staff generally, this is the legacy of the widespread introduction of psychiatric treatment into the care of the elderly over the last few decades.
In the United States, 65–year–olds receive 360% more shock treatment than 64–vear–olds because at age 65 government insurance coverage for shock typically takes effect.
Such extensive abuse of the elderly is not the result of medical incompetence. In fact, medical literature clearly cautions against prescribing tranquilizers to the elderly because of the numerous dangerous side effects. Studies show ECT shortens the lives of elderly people significantly. Specific figures are not kept as causes of death are usually listed as heart attacks or other conditions.
The abuse is the result of psychiatry maneuvering itself into an authoritative position over aged care. From there, psychiatry has broadly perpetrated the tragic but lucrative hoax that aging is a mental disorder requiring extensive and expensive psychiatric services.
The end result is that, rather than being cherished and respected, too often our senior citizens suffer the extreme indignity of having their power of mind heartlessly nullified by psychiatric treatments or their lives simply brought to a tragic and premature end.