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76yo mother ran out in 60mph traffic screaming at the sky because "a voice" told her she would die if she didn't do it. Cop took her to hospital. They said she didn't meet criteria for mental health admission. They did a CT scan and said there was a mild abnormality and she should be scheduled for a MRA. She has not been formally diagnosed with dementia, just severe depression, ptsd, and grief. (PTSD because of her husband's death supposedly.) She's been having vivid hallucinations and terrifying delusions in spite of taking rexulti, seroquel, effexor, buproprion and xanax.
Why does it take so long to get the results of a urinalysis? We don't know anything about that yet. Yet another visit to the geriatric internal medicine doctor coming this Tuesday.
Her psych problems went from zero to eighty in 9 months!
What dementia is so speedy?

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Delirium caused by an infection. Why is she on the heavy duty psych meds if she doesnt have a neurocognitive impairment diagnosis? Severe depression can cause psychosis...How long has she been having symptoms? PTSD isn't generally diagnosed because of a death, did he die in a traumatic way and she witnessed it? Are you sure the diagnosis isn't Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder? It's a trauma and stress related disorder but isn't PTSD. Is mom in a care facility and how long ago did the husband die?
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Otherwise Feb 2021
She witnessed her husband choking to death after a long year of terminal illness. He died April 2020. She began having emotional breakdowns during 2019 as his health deteriorated and we fought his insurance to get help for him. He was kicked out of nursing home too soon and in-home aides were scarce. Her psychosis became evident in August, and has really ramped up in the last month.
She lives in her home. I am sitting with her right now but I will need to get back to my home and job soon. She is under the impression she will go back to normal and she is rejecting my advice to go into assisted living or to at least hire aides.
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That’s a serious mix of psychotropic drugs. I would get a psychiatric consult with medication review. There may be drug incompatibilities that cause many side effects.
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I worry about that mix of drugs as well. This is an amazing cocktail. She likely needs to be in hospital for withdrawal from these meds to see what her baseline is and that MRI to see what the abnormalities are. I am so sorry you are going through this. Await that urinalysis report (likely a C&S will take minimal three days). But abnormality seen in the brain and they have her on these meds? I think I may consider the ER dump until they admit and work her up. That would entail refusal to take her home. You can make up anything you like, but it needs to involve that you are "afraid" to have her in your home under these conditions and cannot accept her back home. They need to do a workup here, not just continue to throw on more psychotropics which may be worsening the condition by a LOT.
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Echoing Alva and Bridger, I literally gasped at this cocktail of drugs.   What kind of doctor prescribed these?  Or is this a blend of scripts from doctors who aren't working together?

If she was to be scheduled for further eval, wasn't the hospital in a position to do it then?   It seems to me that her behavior dictated more workup, then, or discharging her with a script to have further workup done. 

The questions you asked can't really be answered succinctly as we don't know what hospital, what was done, other than a CAT scan, and more specifically, why the hospital didn't schedule these.   It's been my experience that hospitals have done this, but the pandemic demands may have altered ER behavior.   Or the hospital is owned by a company that looks only to the bottom line as opposed to therapeutical behavior.

And on Tuesday, the first issue I'd raise is the cocktail of drugs.
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Alva is a nurse. I just worked with RNs and my daughter is one and I question the use of all these drugs. I agree that Mom needs to be taken off of everything. Her evaluated after tests have been done to make sure nothing is in her system then the drugs introduced one at a time.
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She's on two antidepressants and two antipsychotics. That's kind of a no no, are they in the process of changing the meds and tapering one? It makes no sense to me why she would need to be on two. Someone with psychosis should also have someone handling their meds for them. Accidents can easily happen.

To answer your question, dementia does not progress that fast. She could have been having symptoms that no one noticed for a while but this doesn't really sound like dementia to me. The psychosis could be caused by the meds.
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Beatty Mar 2021
Or severe depression with psychosis.
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And she drinks too as you said on another thread and is in detox? If she is drinking and on all of these meds I am not surprised. She needs a thorough workup, detox and a desire to stop drinking. Where did she get all these meds? From a doc? Prescriptions? Anything bought on the street you never know what may be in them.
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These medications she is on is to treat schizophrenia. Is that what she has?
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