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Deliberate or just losing his mind?
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this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2025
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He never lifted a finger on us or our mother. He was a gentle man.
Then he started saying weird things, like we had made a fake copy of the family house with fake copies of the furniture and the things inside the house to gaslight him. When we tried to prove to him that it was our real house, he'd get annoyed. Frontotemporal dementia causes sufferers to stop recognizing things as their own, and familiar people as the real people they know. It's very odd.
Then one day he found his car keys that we had hidden for his own safety (he got real mad about that one too), drove off and almost killed himself going down a one-way street. He later claimed the street hadn't been one-way the night before. It had been one-way for a good 15 years.
And then the whole conspiracy theory he had latched onto went wild: he claimed we tried to make him mad with the fake house and the fake things so we could send him off to a mental institution and steal his money - and of course, when we did send him there, it was confirmation to him, and he refused to talk to us ever again after that when we visited him. He tried to hit us with a fire iron that day.
One day, he drank too much. My Mom tried to stop him drinking and he hit her, saying "You impostor won't tell me what to do!"
Another time, he went to the bank to arrange something or other with his bank account, and ended up screaming his head off at the teller for trying to steal his money, and that the bank was in cahoots with the impostors trying to control his life at home. The bank had to call the cops and the fire department to get him under control.
Long story short, at some point, we had to institutionalize him. He was so violent at the medicalized retirement house that they had to hammer him with meds until he was reduced to a dribbling mess.
And one day, he was so heavily medicated that he fell down the stairs at the institution, broke his hip, and 4 weeks later, he died. In a way, it was a blessing in disguise, as this shortened his suffering and ours by a good 10 years.
Our experience with our Dad is a depressingly common one, sadly.
Someone in your family if I may ask?
Thanks for the answer and taking the time to write it down!
No, nothing like that, at least as far as i know. I just find it in a certain way terrifying how much we can change without even realising that change happened at all.
That too is my biggest fear: if I lost my grip on reality, I wouldn't even know it and I'd end up making my loved ones miserable without realizing it.
My grandmother lived a life of being socially graceful, and in her dementia she mostly treated all the unknown and confusing new things and people (who were not really new) mostly with kindness and grace. I have thought on this occasionally and tried to seed into every recess of my mind the idea of approaching the confusing and unknown with curiosity and peaceful kindness, as well as trust whenever possible. My hope is that this would pay off in the event I, too, end up with dementia, or any other conddition for which this could be helpful to the people trying to help me.