Not Winter Flowers
I was reading a list serve post yesterday that told of the member’s father (a retired attorney in another state) who got a call from a scammer claiming to be an attorney working on behalf of a grandchild in trouble with the law. The post was essentially a “heads-up” kind of post to a new mutation on the old long lost grandchild scam. You can read an article about how that scam works from the perspective of the scammer here. Sadly, some other members of the list serve community reported a couple instances of this one when it worked successfully, relieving the loving grandparent of a sum of money. One such scam was traced to a caller in the Ukraine! If it sounds like it might never happen to an elder you know, think again – these folks are quite sophisticated.
This is an introduction to some news that I recently read about our neighbors in the UK: Dementia is the leading cause of death in England and Wales. Read the BBC News article here.
This means that as other health challenges are effectively managed throughout one’s old age, dementia remains in the background so to speak, a silent killer. It’s no surprise that the bulk of these dementia deaths were of women, as women tend to have a longer life span than men. What I thought was particularly interesting was this figure: Dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, accounted for 15.2% of all female deaths, up from 13.4% in 2014. Is this due to more effective means of diagnosing Alzheimer’s (which ordinarily must be done with a brain autopsy or at least a slice of that organ’s tissue to identify those amyloid plaques)? Or is it due to an actual rise in the number of persons afflicted with the disease, as demonstrated in the graph in the article which shows it steadily overtaking heart disease since 2012?
Dementia is a leading side effect if you will – of our longevity. This news doesn’t just impact our health and longevity of course, factors mightily in the need for further raising the awareness of elder abuse. Folks with dementia are likely to be victims of some form of elder abuse, neglect or exploitation. The burden on the rest of us to be able to detect elder abuse is crucial to our collective well-being. The community plays a foremost role in the detection of elder abuse in its many forms and so community members – through meals on wheels volunteer, peers at a community center or members of a faith community, can play a major part in this effort. I don’t want to minimize the importance of prevention, but I think our awareness needs to focus first on the detection of the myriad forms of elder abuse.
My introduction to this post was about a scam by someone posing as a person assisting a grandchild – but most of the reported cases do not involve “stranger danger” as it is called in the child welfare context. Sadly, when the abuser or exploiter is an adult child or other family member (as the vast majority of such cases appear to be) the elder is faced with a difficult choice indeed because their ability to be maintained in their own home is severely compromised. We have some battered women’s shelters, but no emergency housing for abused elders. We simply must be able to move forward with the development of services for at risk elders and design some kind of basic architecture of supportive services. Right now, everything is dependent on where an elder lives. How many community resources there are largely depends on local and state funding because whether the detection resources, such as law enforcement and adult protection services, are adequately informed to detect elder abuse – makes a huge difference.
Here’s a link to a very informative program from Nashville Public Television. Especially as we tout “aging in place” as the best kind of living arrangements for most elders, we must face what that can mean for them and the risks it can pose. We must respond to this call for being present to our elder community members! I will write more about what looks to most of us to be a challenging landscape of familial relations and unfamiliar ethical territory.
© Barbara E. Cashman 2016 www.DenverElderLaw.org