There is a disturbing trend in the mental health community, and that is, older patients who were started many years ago on unsophisticated psychotropic drugs, if any at all, and now often wander our city streets in sad droves, mumbling, drooling, asking for lunch or drink money to wash their agony away, and just seem to be forgottem/
I have talked a great deal about both my gemeration (late Boomer), and some information and comfort for the sorely troubled among Generation X, but what of the 60-plus generation who are basically on their own and not receiving adequate medical care for their schizophrenia or bi-polar, even borderline disorders?(This illness isn't exslusive to us---it was just recently diangnosed properly). We have to turn some of our compasssion toward these umfortunate castaways, of they just fell through the cracks in the system and end up in places like the lawn in front of the White House, or, here in Canada, wandering the streets of Otttawa, our nation's capital.
What is the answer to this burning question? How can the often homeless elderly among us get much-needed help? For no other reason, and I sincerely hope there is, we outselves will be among the drifting and the lost if the government keeps shutting down hospitals and kicking more out into the wild netherworlds of the street. The time is NOW to decide to become politically active, if not for John Doe humting through garbage dumpsters at age seventy, then for the security of your pwn future. You do not stay young and mobiles forever, and society loses interest in you when you retire.
My fellow older Boomers turned fifty last year. That is quite a milestone, just fifteen years from retirement. This is fine if you are financiallly secure and emotioally sound, like my parents, but what of others caught in the institutuionalization stage, people who have been residents of the London Pyschiatric Hospital for more than twenty-five years. When that hospital closes, and it defitely will by 1999, both young and old will be cast out.
But at least if you have youth and physical health on your side, what do you do? We have a government-funded nursing home here but it has a very long waiting list. BPD is not confined to the young and the disenfranchised. Older folk, the ones upon whom get preyed, are easy targets for scams and cruetly by an uneducated publid.
A lor of these poeple fought in several major wars. They carry internal scars that never fade or vanish.I met an elderly Jewish patient while hospitalized once and she was s survivor of a Nazi concentration camp. The horrid, unspeakable experience has left her a veritable basket case.
Please do me and the emotionally ill you enoumter on the street, go up and introduce yourself and even ask them if they want a friendly hug. If you are near a Thrift Shop, stop by in the dead of winter and pick up a coat for a decent price and give it to someone shivering on the sidewalk amid the snow and the dirty slush. Chances are he or she will be ill, elderly or both. If WE don't do something, nobody will, because we have trod the road of mental illness and are still winding our way back to emotional health. Thank you. Hug an elderly woman who looks lost and confused. You will be surprised at the joyful smile you get. Believe me, it is worth volumes.
These poor people need us. We understand their pain. Please don't turn your backs on them. For one thing, they could be us in a number of years