US care homes over-prescribing drugs for residents with dementia, report finds

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

US care homes over-prescribing drugs for residents with dementia, report finds

• Human Rights Watch likens it to use of ‘chemical restraints’
• ‘Government does little to protect vulnerable residents from abuse’

Jessica Glenzain New York
Mon 5 Feb 2018 14.00 GMT

Nursing homes in the US are inappropriately medicating an estimated 179,000 residents with dementia each week, in what amounts to use of “chemical restraints”, according to a new Human Rights Watch report.

The 157-page report, titled ‘They Want Docile’ claims thousands of long-term nursing-home patients with dementia are inappropriately given antipsychotic drugs not designed for them. In many cases, the report states, antipsychotics are prescribed because of their sedating effects, making dementia patients easier for staff to handle.

Antipsychotic drugs carry a serious warning from the US Food and Drug Administration called a “black box” because the drugs increase dementia patients’ risk of death. The drugs were developed to treat psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia.

Hannah Flamm, an NYU law school fellow at Human Rights Watch: “People with dementia are often sedated to make life easier for overworked nursing home staff, and the government does little to protect vulnerable residents from such abuse.

“All too often, staff justify using antipsychotic drugs on people with dementia because they interpret urgent expressions of pain or distress as disruptive behavior that needs to be suppressed.”

-snip-

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/05/us-nursing-homes-dementia-report-human-rights-watch

[Historic NY]

1. They create zombies.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. That happened to my boss when he went into a nursing home last fall.

He had a neurological condition like ALS but his mind was still sharp. He needed help with dressing and eating.

When we went to visit him shortly after admission, he was slurring his speech, his head was bent perpendicularly on his chest, and they put him in a wheelchair. I could tell he was fighting to stay in the moment.

I *knew* they gave him antipsychotics as routine but I couldn't do anything about it.

Damn! It was heartbreaking as the ALS-like syndrome was debilitating by itself, but knowing that the nursing home neutered him was like "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest".

And when I tried to tell anyone, they were skeptical of my claims.

Bob died within three weeks of admission. Heart attack. Or broken heart. Or he wanted to leave that place any way he could.

[leftyladyfrommo]

3. My mother was in a nursing home in Washington State.

They have some kind of regulations there that patients have to be taken off meds or have their meds lowered or something like that just to be sure they are not over medicating.

I think they had to do that about every 6 months. In Spokane only certain nursing homes can take patients with mental health issues. My mother had psychotic episodes and she took a very low dose of something. It controlled her paranoia but she was always perfectly lucid. My brother could always tell when they had lowered her meds because she started telling him that there were no nurses on duty in the home, that the help was selling drugs in the halls, and that the poor person cleaning the floor was trying to kill her roommate. As soon as she got back on her meds she was ok again.