Dementia with psychiatric issues

hornet99

Hello,

My dad was diagnosed with atypical (non motor) Parkinson’s with Dementia 3 years ago. His major quality of life symptoms are tenesmus (feeling the urge to go to the bathroom) to the point where he spends most of his days on the toilet. We’ve taken him to the GI and they have run many abdomen CT scans and it’s just his Parkinson’s slowing his bowels down. His short term memory is also very bad (repeats same question over and over) otherwise he’s relatively normal.

Anyway within the last 2 months he’s been having these “episodes” (every 3 days or so) where he’ll tell us he’s in pain and doesn’t want to live anymore. He says he could never kill himself but he hates his life and wishes we had assisted suicide.

We believe it’s time to get him into skilled nursing and are going through the process. Unfortunately that takes time. We have also considered taking him to a psychiatric hospital but we’re concerned that will red flag him and the “nice” nursing homes won’t want to take him.

Anyway he has an appointment with a psychiatrist next week. I have two questions 1) do a lot of dementia patients go through this 2) what questions should we be asking the psychiatrist next week?

We really want to avoid commiting him to a psychiatric institution.

Thanks in advance,

John

towhee

Hi Hornet99, welcome to the forum. Talking about suicide does sometimes happen. It is really good that you managed to get him an appointment. What you do does depend on the specific circumstances. Since your LOs memory is bad you might want to be prepared with information for the doctor in a written form. You definitely want to ask questions about how medications will affect his current disease symptoms and any side effects to watch out for, and how long before medication might be expected to show results.

hornet99

Thanks for the response. It took me months to get an appointment with an actual psychiatrist and I may not get another one for him for 6-9 months. So I need to make my time count.

Based on others experiences are these suicidal thoughts something that psychoactive medications can help improve? If we can mitigate this one issue I believe he could live with us for another year, maybe longer. When he’s not in these moods (95% of the time) he’s a pleasure to have around. I hate to send him to a nursing home or worse, a psychiatric hospital for an issue that only exists 5% of the time. We just don’t know how to handle it when these “episodes” occur.

jfkoc

You are very likely dealing with gastroparesis from the Parkinson's. It is one of the non-motor symptoms of that disease. The dementia is likely Lewy Body Disease. The meds for these are not the same.

Your father needs to be under the care of a Neurologist specializing in Parkinson's. You need I suggest

https://www.parkinson.org/

My husband journey was MCI>Parkinson's>Lewy Body Disease. Please feel free to contact me.

Judith