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My mom has vascular dementia, possibly Lewy Bodies. She keeps having hallucinations of my father (passed three years now) visiting her and confronting her with things she obviously has had deeply hidden guilt about. He was not my bio dad, but only dad I knew. He had 4 children from a previous marriage when my mom and he met- ages 2, 4, 6 and 8. Though I know he paid child support he never saw them again. She thinks he is angry with her and blaming her for not ever seeing them again, saying things like "your dad keeps telling me if I didn't dress so nicely at work he wouldn't have fallen in love with me and he wouldn't have lost all of his kids". I don't know the timeline- there have been many secrets in my family- one of which was that he was my bio dad until I was 26- my brother who was dying spilled the beans. I'm 43 now and we never talked about it again after that was brought out. I had a fake birth certificate, etc to put me younger so it looked like I was my dad's until then. Is it normal for dementia to torture someone like this? It's breaking my heart for her. She's a woman of faith and I know has asked forgiveness for many things in her life- and she doesn't think he is a hallucination, she thinks he is haunting her and she is afraid to die because she thinks he will be angry when she meets him in heaven. The nursing home does not have memory care where we live so they don't seem to know how to help her very much. She gets another psych eval Wednesday but she hates telling "strangers" about her hallucinations as she is still herself and gets embarrassed by all of this. Experience? Help? Thoughts?

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cwillie is right. If she is a woman of faith, ask her minister to counsel her. She needs to unload the baggage and feel at peace. That won't stop the hallucinations, but it may help her find more pleasant ones.
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Is she religious? If so it may ease her mind to have some faith based counselling.
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Is there a geriatric psychiatrist, psych Nurse Practitioner, someone who knows meds? Part of this horrible disease is the loss of normal brain chemistry. It might APPEAR to be the resurfacing of old issues, but in facy, i believe it is a lack of normal levels of neurotransmitters in the brain. There was no amount of reassurance that helped my mom. Just antidepressants and antianxiety meds. Please try to get her some help of that sort!
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Thank you. She is in stage 4 kidney failure, too- she keeps a UTI so I know that doesn't help. They never give her anything to calm her down, they just tell her to call me... I've been mom's counselor for all things for all things for so long, and I have no answers for her on this!
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My mom has vascular dementia, no suspicion of LBD. She doesn't hallucinate, but she occasionally becomes convinced that she's a terrible person, is going to Hell, and didn't pay her income tax in 1939. She gets agitated and upset, crying and wringing her hands. The staff at the NH has become alert to this. They test her for a UTI and if that's negative, the psych APRN ups her anti-anxiety med ( klonopin) temporarily.

There are a couple of folks here whose loved ones had LBD. I hope one of them will be along with some suggestions.
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