Elder abuse under 5150
Hello all,
My mom is 85 and has some dementia. In the past, for decades, she was a brutally battered wife.
Recently she has been upset with her husband, my father, who is 82.he has begun to rebell for the first time in her life. She does not want to cook. She wants to make her own decisions. She does not want to be controlled and has recently been accusing him of having a girlfriend (probably untrue but there is the possibility of truth in the accusation.) Her dwelling in his infidelity is probably, but not certainly, an effect of the dementia. She upsets my father when she accuses him of this transgression although he does have some history of philandering.
My wife and i have been actually encouraging her movement toward psychological independence but apparently society does not. I have also counseled her to back off on the accusations and get a private investigator if she really believes what she is saying. She has not yet hired a private investigator.
They drink a lot and my father seems to keep my mother drunk when ever he does not want to deal with her. He pours alcohol until she is incoherent and limp.
Both my father and mother fall occasionally. Before my mother’s last analyst appointment, my father fell on his face and had a bruised cheek and black eye. Both of them independently told me that he just fell.
In an act of cruel irony, on the last trip to her analyst and after perpetrating violence on her for many years, my father said something that indicated to the psychiatrist that she was violent toward him. For some reason the analyst assumed that my father’s black eye was caused by my mother. She is not a violent person and there has never been any indication that she was physically violent toward anyone. She claims she has never been violent toward my father. She is coherent and believable. They put her in a hospital under 5150. Toward the end of the 72 hours, her psychiatrist put an additional two week hold on her under sec 5250.
I think my mother’s liberty has unjustly been taken away. I believe this was casually done because it is assumed that an older person’s liberty is not as precious as a younger person’s. I also believe that without any proof other than a bruise that she did not cause – and perhaps the word of her husband – she was the victim of sexist doctrine that assumes that the husband to be a more credible witness.
My father also exhibits dementia – frequent blank moments where he forgets his purpose, yet, the psychiatrist has never seen the need to evaluate him. SHE is presumed to be the problem. I am enraged over this. We know that we have come a long way in the more obvious expressions of discrimination but in the guts of our society it appears we have not progressed much beyond 1800.
My mother has been involuntarily committed to a hospital. She is coherent and not violent. How do I get her out? And what can I do to try to keep this sort of thing from happening to others?
We are in California.
Please help.
