Q: an adult woman with severe physical disabilites, very imobile, constantly defiant to any suggestions for therapy or assistance,
Hi there
I see that Judy has already given you some excellent advice and suggestions. May we ask...are you this person's caregiver, friend, or relative? It sounds like a difficult situation to witness.
In addtion to what Judy has offered I am going to give you a link to our Alzheimer's site. It doesn't sound like this is the ailment that this woman has...yet they have a lot of posts on their site about caregiving and how to overcome these sorts of emotional challenges.
The National Family Caregiver's Association may be another resource which may help.
Please let us know if you require any more resources or assistance.
Thank you for your question.
MM
Hi, there. This sounds like a challenging situation. Is there anybody at all that this woman trusts? To me, it sounds like she might be suffering from depression and maybe some other things, as well. Depression might be truly understandable with the physical disabilities. Is this a behavior that has just started recently or has she been this way for quite some time?
When you say that she resists suggestions for therapy, do you mean psychotherapy? Perhaps someone could speak to her regular doctor about what's going on and he/she could do something to get her the help she needs, maybe even if it's trying an antidepressant. Does she have regular caregivers that aren't family/friends? Does she have a social worker that someone could talk to?
Without knowing much about her or her disabilities, it might be easy to say that she also sounds narcissistic because of her disregard for others and manipulation with guilt and tears. It sounds like a psychological evaluation might be of some help, just to know what's going on with her. Maybe the people involved in her care could use some psychological help, too! It's sometimes difficult to know the right thing to do - you don't want to keep enabling her to act this way, yet she's truly in need of help. I would probably talk with whatever professional caregivers are in her life and see if a plan of action can be constructed. It must be very hard to be around her - she kind of reminds me of my mother, who is probably not as disabled as this person, so we tend to just not spend a lot of time with her.
Wish I could be more helpful, but it sounds like she needs some kind of re-evaluation of her needs and an intervention of some kind. Please let us know if we can be of further help - I wish you all the best.
If someone spoke to her doctor, he would not have to tell her that anyone did but he could then maybe ask her more relevant questions that could lead him to make some other recommendations. Maybe she needs to be on antidepressants - he could prescribe those. I'm sure it's very hard to not take it personally when she lashes out - nobody should have to take that. I have a sister (not disabled) who can be very sweet but God help you if she is having a bad day or gets stressed by anything. We walk on eggshells around her. She's another one I just try to avoid, unfortunately, but it's not worth starting World War III to confront her.
Again, I hope things work out for everyone and that you all find a solution to how to deal with her.
Thank you so much for your comments.
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She has days when she is better and some when she is very severely thoughtless. She is in pain and has a hard time even moving. This makes her weaker and then less able to even do the things she can do, like grab her phone or type on her computer. The therapy would be her range of motion, her rolling, her getting up in her wheelchair... she has a nice doctor she talks to and friends she visits with. She has a care giver who is not related, but hired through a medicaid waiver.
If we could speak to her doc, she would be annoyed about that, being HER business, not OURS. It would be tattling, or talking about her when she isn't present.
She is a precious, loving person. She cares for her cats, her neices and nephews, her friends and their families, her friends on the computer, her old friends who come by. But then in private times her frustration seems to boil over to hurt the feelings of the people who are the closest to her. She does not mean to do that. She loses perspective when all this is happening. It is hard to not take it personally when she is like that. It is also hard to not strike back with reflective language to her, which makes it even worse, because she doesn't know how it could possibly be her that started the drama of the whole episode. Or maybe it isn't her and WE are the ones who are being blind to OUR shortness or whatever...