Dear Alliance Member,
We are delighted to announce that we are going to have the 1st Annual Statewide Geriatric Mental Health Alliance Conference on May 31, 2007 at the Hotel Pennsylvania in NYC. The theme is Geriatric Mental Health: Challenges and Opportunities Across the Horizon. Steve Bartels, MD, MS, Professor of Psychiatry, Dartmouth Medical School, an eminent researcher in geriatric mental health, will be the keynote speaker. Dr. Bartels served as a consultant to the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health’s Subcommittee on Older Adults, and he is a past president of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry.
So, please Save the Date! More details to follow.
We hope you will attend.
Michael and Kim
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
February 15, 2007 - Geriatric Mental Health Best Practices Presentation: Non-Pharmacological Alzheimer's Treatment with Dr. John Zeisel, Ph.D., President and Co-Founder of Hearthstone Alzheimer Care co-sponsored by the Geriatric Mental Health Alliance and the Brookdale Center on Aging of Hunter College on Thursday, February 15, 2007 from 3:00-5:00pm at the Hunter College School of Social Work - Auditorium, 129 East 79th Street, NYC. Please make a registration by emailing yhsin@mhaofnyc.org or calling (212) 614-6356. The event is free but pre-registration is required.
May 31, 2007 - Save the Date: 1st Annual Geriatric Mental Health Alliance Conference. Please join fellow Alliance members from around the state for our first annual conference entitled “Geriatric Mental Health: Challenges and Opportunities Across the Horizon” on May 31, 2007 from 10:00-4:00pm at the Hotel Pennsylvania. Steve Bartels, MD, MS, Professor of Psychiatry, Dartmouth Medical School, will be the keynote speaker. Dr. Bartels served as a consultant to the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health's Subcommittee on Older Adults, and he is a past president of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry. More details to follow.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New Director of the NYS Office for the Aging
Governor Spitzer has appointed Michael Burgess to be the next Director of the State Office for the Aging. Mr. Burgess had been the Executive Director of the Alliance for Retired Americans for several years as well as previous Executive Director of the NY Statewide Senior Action Council. He is an avid advocate for older adult issues, and we look forward to working with him on geriatric mental health.
For more information, please view the press release.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Farewell to Neal Lane
We are grateful for the leadership that Neal Lane provided for the NYS Office of the Aging. He is a man of vision and compassion, who is dedicated to helping older adults continue to lead active, productive, and creative lives as well as to assisting those with disabilities to get the care that they need. He was a major force in moving NYS to make geriatric mental health a priority. We wish him well for the future.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From the National Coalition on Aging
The Issue: Congress will soon vote on final appropriations for 2007, so we have a golden opportunity to press for additional funding to help seniors in need. Please urge your Senators and Representative to increase funds for Older Americans Act programs and outreach efforts to low-income seniors.
Background: Last year’s Congress failed to complete the appropriations bills that pay for basic government programs, so the new Congress must get them done. Their target date for finishing everything is mid-February. The new Democratic chairs of the appropriations committees have stripped more than $7 billion in “earmarks” from the bills. NCOA is asking Congress to do two things with the Fiscal Year 2007 appropriations bill:
- Use 1 percent ($70 million) of the $7 billion to increase in Older Americans Act (OAA) funding. OAA spending saves other dollars by reducing premature nursing home placement, averting malnutrition and controlling chronic health conditions. Most OAA programs have been flat-funded for years, meaning purchasing power has been seriously eroded, both by inflation and by the growing numbers of seniors in need.
- Put $4 million into outreach to help low-income seniors pay for prescription drugs. Millions of needy Medicare beneficiaries have not signed up for the Medicare Part D Low-Income Subsidy (LIS or Extra Help), even though they are eligible for it. The OAA authorizes a new National Center on Senior Benefits Outreach and Enrollment to focus on finding and enrolling low-income seniors in needs-based benefits for which they are eligible. Congress should provide first-year funding for the Center, which will find and enroll low-income seniors in Part D and other needs- based programs. More than half of the $4 million would go to 25 state and local centers across the country.
Take Action! Please contact your three elected officials – two Senators and one Representative – about these issues in the next five days. Make these two points to them:
- The Older Americans Act preserves seniors’ health and independence, but funding has been frozen for years. Work to add $70 million to OAA spending in the FY07 appropriations bill (that’s 1% of the stripped earmark funds).
- Millions of poor Medicare beneficiaries are not receiving the extra help they need with prescription drugs. Work to put $4 million in the FY07 appropriations bill for the National Center on Senior Benefits Outreach and Enrollment.
Time is short – the House vote is scheduled for January 31, and the Senate vote the following week. Please act promptly! You can send an e-mail to your Senators and Representative by using the NCOA website, which includes a sample letter -- click here.
For additional information on the 1% request, click here.
For additional information on the National Center, click here.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Care in Old Age: Confronting the Inevitable
From the New York Times
January 21, 2007
By Paula Span
MY mother absolutely refuses to discuss any of this stuff,” my friend Linda said grumbling as we walked out of our exercise class in Montclair, N.J.
The hard stuff, she meant. The questions about what will happen if her mother — who is 80 and starting to develop heart problems, dizziness, the usual unwelcome signals — grows seriously ill or too frail to manage her own care. The stuff everyone should talk through before a crisis hits, but hardly anyone can bear to.
Linda thinks her stepfather may have some sort of legal document, or maybe her cousin does, but she doesn’t really know. Her attempts to gently raise the subject of the future lead only to brusque dismissals. So one day — in three years or three weeks, who can say? — Linda will have to embark not only on a crash course in elder care, but possibly an exercise in mind-reading as well. Worse, she may face combat with other family members who have other ideas.
I tend to have such conversations a lot lately, as people learn I’m working on a book about families who care for aging parents. Everybody’s got a story. And their stories make me particularly grateful for my father.
He’s 84, in reasonably good health and so busy — between runs to pick up the morning paper for neighbors, volunteer envelope-stuffing, synagogue events and regular poker games — that my sister and I often have trouble reaching him on the phone. “Up and around,” he reports jauntily when I finally get through. “Can’t complain.”
I don’t want to canonize my dad. He’s not the go-to guy for heartfelt talk about emotional matters. We probably should forswear all debate about the Middle East. And he’s so cheap — though always generous to my sister and me — that when he and a friend realized they were sending their Discover card payments to the same address, they started mailing them in a single envelope to save postage. (When the company understandably misapplied one’s check to the other’s account, did they suspend the practice? No, they merely began stapling their checks to their payment stubs, thus preserving an annual savings of $2.34 apiece.) He can, in short, be maddening.
But my father is admirably clear-eyed about what lies ahead. Several years ago, for no urgent reason except that he’s an even bigger believer in “Be Prepared” than the Boy Scouts, he and my mother sold their little bungalow with the steep porch steps. They moved into an apartment building with an elevator, and when she developed terminal cancer not long afterward, we were relieved that they had.
Now that Dad’s on his own, we’ve had long discussions about things like someday hiring aides so he can stay in his South Jersey apartment (too isolating, he thinks) versus moving into assisted living. We have even toured a couple of local assisted living places, debating whether one’s too spartan, another unnecessarily chandeliered.
At times, I’m aware that his realism has limits. Dad was alarmed by the tiny closet in one of the assisted living apartments. “I’d have to get rid of a lot of stuff,” he muttered, most likely imagining his energetic self in this new setting, not a weakened man who may not require an extensive wardrobe.
But he knows he’s not immortal. When I drive down to visit, he leads me into the den to show me, once more, the important papers, all signed and witnessed.
One folder holds the advance directive for health care, authorizing me to make “any and all health care decisions ... including decisions to accept or to refuse any treatment,” if he is unable to make them himself.
In another, he has stored the durable power of attorney that allows my sister and me to handle his financial affairs and “do whatsoever they think necessary on my behalf” if he’s incapacitated. It also contains his will.
It’s startling how few people have taken these steps. Only 29 percent of Americans have drafted a living will or an advance directive, the Pew Research Center reported earlier this year. Even among severely or terminally ill patients, the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has found, fewer than half have advance directives in their medical records.
It’s not hard to see why. Frailty, disease, ultimately death — what older person wants to contemplate those? Delay and denial seem preferable.
But consider the consequences of that distaste. I know a Baltimore woman whose mother blithely rejected all such discussion. “A will is just something for children to fight over,” she insisted, right through her 80s. Now, Alzheimer’s disease makes her no longer competent to sign any legal document, even if she could be persuaded to. Without a power of attorney, her children can’t get access to her savings or sell her house to help care for her. Going to court to seek guardianship could cost thousands of dollars better spent for aides and drugs.
When my father falters, I expect to be just as anguished, frightened and overwhelmed. The services and programs available for ailing parents are bewildering and frequently inadequate and the costs daunting; having an advance directive doesn’t guarantee better decisions.
But at least I won’t have to wonder, or argue with relatives about, what my dad wants, because he has told me. At least I’ll have the legal ability to take care of him.
I feel for friends whose otherwise rational elders announce, “I don’t want to talk about it.” Or who say, “Just promise you’ll never send me to a nursing home,” a pledge no one without a crystal ball can honestly make. Or even — a daughter in Rockland County passed this along — “I’m not moving anywhere except into your house.” They’re abdicating their roles, forcing their children to be the responsible parties, even before they have to be.
My father probably isn’t a popular guy at Discover card, but I see how hard he works to remain the protector, the one who makes the hard calls, the one who spares his children. I don’t need his protection any longer, but I deeply appreciate what may turn out to be his final act of parenthood.
Paula Span teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and is at work on “When the Time Comes: Aging Parents, Tough Choices,” to be published by Springboard Press next year.
