According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, a physical restraint is “any manual method, or any physical or mechanical device, material or equipment attached or adjacent to the person’s body that the person cannot remove easily and that restricts the person’s freedom of movement or normal access to his or her body. It is the effect the device has on the person that classifies it as a restraint, not the name or label given to the device, nor the purpose or intent of the device. ” (PDF here)
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“Don’t you look comfortable in that lovely chair?” a smiling woman says when she comes to visit, not realizing that her sister, like my mother, is trapped in the sunroom recliner as surely as if she were in a straightjacket. I say nothing. I don’t want to make the infrequent visitor feel bad, like I do every time I see my mother bound by the physical and chemical restraints that are the bars on the cells of this ElderJail.
It all seems so wrong and unfair. All Mom wants to do is get up and walk around, like she has done all her life, like the able-bodied among us do freely whenever we want. But she can’t because of the invisible chains that shackle her to the prison of a chair. Here’s what it looks and sounds like when the sedation of the chemical restraints wears off and Mom regains her ability to move:
And two days later:
And three months after that I take pictures and record as I help Mom out of the recliner just as I do every other day that I find her sufficiently recovered from being sedated to stand up:
These are not isolated incidents. This is what it’s like virtually every day of the last 1,000 days of Mom’s life. She is either sedated with chemical restraints or physically restrained in some way, all of which is abuse. Sadly, many many others who live with dementia in LTCFs suffer the same fate.
Safety is used as an excuse, whether it’s really an issue or not. For the most part, the real reasons people living with dementia in LTCFs are physically and chemically restrained are 1) the facilities are understaffed, 2) the staff are undertrained, 3) the administration finds it more cost effective, 4) the medical professionals don’t know any better, or 5) the staff find it more convenient for residents to be immobilized.
The effect on people who live with dementia is devastating. if the videos above haven’t convinced you yet, have a listen here: don’t fence me in: a true story about the impact of physical restraints on my mom who lived with alzheimer disease, and read the vignette here: please remain seated for the rest of your life.
Learn more about other forms of elder abuse here: 7 forms of elder abuse and how to spot the signs to stop it. Please join me in advocating for better elder care, particularly for people who live with dementia.
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My Alzheimer's Story 
This looks just like my mother did in 2011. They sedated her because “she wandered”. She was in a locked ward, the worst she could “wander” was 10 rooms one way and back down a straight hall. But the Ass’t. living home asked the Dr to give her more medicine to “help her sleep”. He did and told us that same day that he instructed the nurses to watch mother carefully these next few days to make sure it wasn’t too much. We left at 3pm that day and I got a call at 10pm that night that she had fallen and hit her head on the A/C unit in her room. She died from that fall. The Dr at the ER showed us that her brain had bled through 7 layers in the CT scan. She never recovered and died 2 wks later. I have a photo of her in the ER with the blood running down the side of her head and she was screaming and crying and so afraid of what was happening to her, my heart broke to know that those were her last moments of some clarity. The place she was cared for at $4000.00 per month, is no longer taking Alzheimer patients thank goodness. We didn’t sue, but we very well could have. My mother is in a better place and with my dad now and that is what I try to remember about her leaving 7 yrs ago this past Monday,1/22/2011.
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Connie, I’m going to share your story on the blog. I’m so sorry about what happened to your mom, it’s so similar to what happened with Mom, who was also drugged with antipsychotics because she wanted to get up and walk around instead of being confined to a chair for eight hours a day. The difference between your mom’s case and mine is that yours was swift 😦
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