She took a potent cocktail of three psychotropic drugs: Ativan for anxiety and the antipsychotic Risperdal to calm her, plus an antidepressant. In all the time she’d lived at Sunrise, she hadn’t spoken. It wasn’t clear whether she could recognize her children when they came to visit...
Alzheimer's Reading Room
“What’s people’s biggest fear? Being a ‘zombie’ in a nursing home,” said Laurel Baxter, the Awakenings project manager.
The results startled even the believers. Every resident on antipsychotics (about 10) was able to stop taking them, and 30 to 50 percent of those taking antidepressants also did well without them.
And what about the woman on the "potent cocktail of three psychotropic drugs"?
In her final months, she smiled and played balloon volleyball with other residents and could say she felt fine or was hungry...She engaged more. Her family came to help her eat.
This article answers the question: are antipsychotic medications necessary for dementia patients, or are they used to lower overhead and increase profit.
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Bob DeMarco is the Founder of the Alzheimer's Reading Room and an X Wall Street executive turned full time Alzheimer's caregiver. The blog contains more than 2,310 articles with more than 285,100 links on the Internet. Bob resides in Delray Beach, FL.
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Original content Bob DeMarco, the Alzheimer's Reading Room