Article archive / November 1, 2015
Originally published: . Volume 6, No. 11. Source pages: 2.
My dad had a great saying, crafted during his fight with the Klan in the 1960s: “There’s no fanatic like one wrapped in a flag, unless it’s one wrapped in both a flag and a religious symbol.”
As a Libertarian (good government is a small one) I wonder if the investigators in this country are becoming overly primed (influenced unconsciously) by power cues. A few things I’ve heard about the investigators at the state medical board were eerily similar to some of the comments I heard about the psychology board’s investigators. The feds have turned their interest to health care providers and the first serious allegations have finally punched through to my conscious mind.
The Justice Department is investigating psychology firms, supposedly for delivering services to nursing homes, primarily it seems, because they think services weren’t deemed “medically necessary.”
Have the investigators ever been to a nursing home? People are not there for two weeks of R&R at a resort.
It’s hard to image anyone there NOT needing a comprehensive psychological evaluation and valid treatment plan derived from valid cognitive, neurological, psychological, and psychiatric conditions. Who can do that but psychologists?
We know that the elderly are put in chemical straight jackets with antipsychotic medications at rates that are a national disgrace. I’ve seen that cattle-call recently with my mother-in-law, who, bless her heart, now seems more like a character from Warm Bodies than herself.
I understand that dying is not all that easy or pleasant if you live long enough to have the drag-it-out-too-old-to-enjoy-much-of-anything- and-nobody-wants-to-talk-to-you-anyway type of golden years experience. But anyone who has been through it with a loved one understands the pressures to conform to the medical establishment’s ingrained models of care.
I went through it with my parents, and had to fight to keep them (relatively) safe from the medical/pharma industrial machine. I had the knowledge and resources––most family members don’t––and was able to hire the right behavioral help. Drugs weren’t needed after all. Magic.
However, before that, the medical people managed to put my dad–– who was legitimately depressed for good reasons––on Geodon. I got him off as quickly as I could, but it had already turned him diabetic. He had to take insulin for the rest of his life.
For our autistic youngsters we require––no, we demand––a quality psychological evaluation for treatment planning. How is it ethical that we put our seniors on drugs instead, and drugs that we know have a debilitating impact on their fragile systems?
The average nursing home resident is on 15–18 medications or more. Estimates are that 47 percent of those in nursing homes are on some type of antidepressant and there is a group about 1/3 that size on antipsychotics, prescribed off-label, according to the mental health watchdog group, CCHR International. The antipsychotics can double the risk of death and triple the risk of stroke. Antidepressants can increase falls and risks of fractures. We have an impossibly convoluted and misaligned system of self-interests going on, and the elderly might be some of the least able to navigate it for themselves.
Psychology has no power or voice in how the deals are made between government, medicine, and big pharma, and we have almost no brand recognition. Its not at all surprising that they would find psychological services to the elderly to be unnecessary – medically.
Just throw a little Geodon at ‘em and they’ll be fine.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.