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She says she can't hear over this one who just keeps banging and making noise in her ear. She makes up stories about people knocking on her door and windows at night. I have literally tried everything to prove to her that this is all in her head including having a psychic cleanse her apartment and getting her new hearing aids. How do I know if there is a more serious issue here? I'm afraid these noises are driving her insane.

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A doctor's visit is in order asap and probably a psych evaluation. There is medication available. Good luck.
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YES, this is very serious issue!

You are NOT going to solve this with logic and explanations. If your mom has any kind of dementia, this may be a sign to you that her brain is changing and can no longer process inputs correctly. She needs to be seen ASAP, just like Littleonway said.

My mom had these very same hallucinations 15 years ago and not one person in the family picked up on the fact this is dementia related. They just wrote her off as weird and crazy instead of getting her help.
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Tina, these are hallucinations and are a sign of a serious medical problems. Your approach so far has no doubt been well intentioned but plain wrong. You need to learn about dementia, hallucinations and quit trying to solve this on your own. Go to the doctor with her. Now, for crying out loud.
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Your profile says that Mother has depression. If that being treated by a specialist, I'd start with that professional. If not, start with her primary care provider, but realize that not all medical doctors are experts at this kind of thing. (Some know diddly squat, actually.) So if her regular doctor doesn't take this seriously or just seems baffled, ask for a referral. A geriatric psychiatrist or a behavioral nuerologist would be my choice.

She isn't making up stores. She is reporting what she experiences and believes. You will NEVER be able to convince her by reason. That is the nature of hallucinations and delusions.

I wish you good luck in finding help soon.
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I should add that we have been to the doctor and they put mom on Zoloft but she refuses to take it.
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What is her reason for not wanting to take Zoloft?
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Ah. Is she a little paranoid, too? Afraid the drug is poison or sent by the spirits, etc.?

Did the doctor who prescribed Zoloft know about the hallucinations/delusions, or has that happened since? Zoloft might help the depression and that would be a good thing all around. But even if she'd take it, I'm not sure it would deal with the other mental health issues.

Some people have "pleasant" hallucinations and delusions. They just want to feed the little kids who come to their house, or worry where the bunnies go when they leave. Your mother is very distressed by the spirits and that raises the priority for dealing with it, in my mind.

If the original doc doesn't know about the "spirits," tell him or her. You may need to see a different specialist.
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She's afraid to tell the doctor about the spirits because she doesn't want to be institutionalized. She claims the zoloft made her feel weird. She took it two days and stopped. I'm making an appointment with a Geriatrician now.
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Just reassure mom that everything will be OK. My mom has had active and vigorous hallucinations for years, and is on medication for it now. There is a protocol the doctor will follow to rule out sources for the problem, and it does NOT start with hospitalization.

I think a lot of elders fear hospitalization because it was super common when they were younger. You got hospitalized for 10 days for anything & everything, and hospitals were scary places. Now, it's too expensive to do that if the person isn't in an obvious crisis.

My advice to tide you over is don't make promises you can't keep, like don't promise her she won't have to ever go to a hospital or nursing home. Just respond that you will work with the doctor to keep her safe, no matter what. And keep reassuring her everything will turn out OK. I tell my mom quite often that we are doing our best for her.

It might be as simple as a urinary tract infection, wrong medication/med combination, advancing dementia, or any number of other neurological things that can happen. The important thing is that you are responding! Good for you!

So many people come here asking for help, and then do nothing with the information and complain nothing changes or the problem got worse. Please come back and tell us what the doctor said!
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Tina, concealing the auditory hallucinations will not help her at all. Call her MD and report what she is experiencing and ask for a referral to a good Neurologist who can image the brain and determine the cause.
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I had a elder neighbor once in TX who had delusions of spirits and people hiding in closets. They planted stink bombs in the closets and did all manner of sneaky evil about the apartment and outside. It turned out the neighbor was having small strokes that were causing the problem. I heard after I left that the neighbor progressed onto dementia -- vascular most likely. I wonder if your mother could be having small strokes that affect her auditory system and is looking for ways to explain what she is hearing. I am glad you are making an appointment with a geriatric specialist. If it is something like this, there are ways to slow it down.

I've heard much about psychotic depression, but the problems seem to be visual hallucinations, such as bugs crawling on walls. I don't know enough to know if there can also be auditory hallucinations with psychotic depression. Your mother's new doctor should be able to tell more after working with her. I hope that you can make her life more comfortable. Living with noise like that would be frightening.
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Get her pillbox and Google every single one of her medications followed by "side effects." (No quote marks.) Namenda, as an example, causes vivid dreams, sleep disturbances and hallucinations. Granted, they are more rare side effects, but if your mom is being effected, the fact that they're rare means little. And, of course, talk to her doctor.

The nursing home doc put mom on Namenda about a month before they sent her mom. I didn't know it until I got a list of her discharge meds. I asked her home doc what he thought, and he said, "Oh, why not keep her on it a while and see what happens."

Well, mom was having nightmares . . . she regularly had conversations with her dead brothers, mom, dad and sister. And a particularly amusing episode where, awake but in bed, she had a visit from Chicken Little. *sigh*

I had a baby monitor in her room when she first came home. She would talk in gutteral voices that scared the livin' DAYLIGHTS out of me. I removed the monitor. Stopped the Namenda. And now? Although she wakes up early, she doesn't talk to anybody anymore. (I thought mom had changed into that green puke girl from the Exorcist.)
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My mom's hallucinations would really take off if she skipped some of her meds. She has always been a rebellious child at heart, and would refuse to take her meds on schedule just to thumb her nose at authority. Here comes the dead people, the people standing over her at night to make sure she didn't get out of bed. The people rummaging in the closet. The people staring at her all day long. The squirrels, the men with red eyes.....

Well, the repercussions of doing that stunt were horrendous. It would take a couple weeks of diligent medication administration to bring her back from that state of confusion and disorientation. Once she felt better, she would refuse to take meds all over again. It was a viscious circle that was not good for her.

That's what put her on the waiting list for an assisted living room to open up in the center she lived in. She ended up skipping that completely and going right into the nursing home/24/7 care unit from skipping meds and blacking out, hitting her head.
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Maggie, I was thinking the same thing, side-effects from the meds. Every pharmaceutical manufacturer uses different fillers in their pills.... majority of people can take said pills with any issues but there is a small percentage of people [I am one] who is hypersensitive to some of the fillers. It could be something as simple as the shellac that some manufacturer's use to coat the pills.

I was also wondering if hallucinations happen if an elder has an urinary tract infection [UTI]?
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Mum was imagining someone knocking at her window a few months after a diabetic siezure then it was someone knocking at her door at night a year later i got her dementia diagnosis after a battle with her doctor get her a brain scan asap thats what mums geriatrician ordered straight away mum been on anti depressants,HBP and high cholestrol pills most of her life and never hallucinated depression can mimic vascular dementia early stages. A brain scan will tell if there is deterioration mums doc was useless thankgod i didnt listen to him.
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Freqflyer - a UTI can mimic dementia behaviors. Every time my mom's been hospitalized for out of control behaviors, that's the first test they do.
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She needs an anti-psychotic.
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