DDad and mental capacity - help!!!

[WillowherbRose]

DDad has very complicated financial affairs and he's struggling to cope with them. There's ccjs, huge amounts of money being sought, and he is convinced everything can be argued away in his favour.

He has had several strokes and has advanced cerebral small vessel disease. He clearly has some form of dementia and I'm pushing for this to be assessed with the gp / memory clinic.

He talks a good talk. If you weren't aware of the inconsistencies in the Acts of Parliament that he quotes, or the incorrect assumptions that he builds everything on, he would sound lucid and in control.

He lost a court case some years ago on an issue that he was told he had misinterpreted from the very start. He insisted he was right and lost, all told, over £70 thousand. It now seems to be happening again...

Does anyone have experience of where I go with this? The assessments the gp have done in the past tend to be "what year is it" type questions, and while some will trip him up, I need some kind of assessment that will investigate the more complicated situation

He's mid 80s. As I said - ccjs and indeed talk of sale orders now. He can be aggressive and verbally abusive, and is completely, utterly, totally inflexible.

And he's also a hoarder, living in squalor. He will not move.

Poor everyone involved. There’s an elderly parents board around where someone might know and/or have been through similar.

Try googling Mental Capacity Act code of practice. It's available online no charge. It explains what an assessment of capacity should consist of and the principles of capacity (it is time and decision specific for example: you can have capacity to buy a new TV for example but maybe not make a decision about a house purchase). Good luck

Thank you delurking - it is sad. My mum is beside herself with worry, she was crying in the restaurant the other day saying she couldn't take being screamed at any more. Meanwhile, DDad is consumed with needing to prove he's right. And I can't help him that because... Well. He's wrong

pinkprosecco I will search out the code of practise, thank you

The mental capacity act can be quite complex because you can be deemed to.have capacity for some things but not for others , if your Dad does have a type of dementia depending on what type he might present quite differently ,some people with vascular dementia can have good days and appear quite capable and then on others ,not so much , i expect the Gp has done a mini mental state test with him ,it can be quite good because it can show areas of defecit, but if your Dad is having a " good day " he may score highly which isnt helpful to.his situation it's a while since I worked in Dementia care but I suspect you and your mum need to keep pushing the Gp.for referral to the memory clinic .

Thank you x2boys - that is exactly what we're worried about. We've seen him stumble through the brief tests before - he watches to see people's reactions and tries to pick up whether he's getting it right or now

He was seen by the memory clinic about five years ago and it was left that he could return, so hopefully, we'll be passed back

I apologise for resurrecting a thread that's not been posted on for some time, but I'm really interested to hear @WillowherbRose what happened with your dad and the mental capacity test. I have an in-law with very similar issues (extreme inflexibility, hoarding, screams at spouse) and am trying to work out how to get them assessed. In my in-law's case I doubt they'll even agree to a test - they'll be screaming hysterically the second they determine that we think they are in some way incapable - so if you or anyone else has insights into how to finagle someone into doing such a test, or at least getting them into the room so that the expert can see how bad they are, that'd also be very welcome.

Hi @Seashore2018 I'm Willowherb after a name change...

so... a year and a half later and things aren't any better. We did take my Dad to the GP (details later on), and he was referred onto the dementia / mental health clinic. We has one meeting there where he met with a consultant. DM and I went in first and spoke to the consultant, then he joined us. He was told that he had dementia and he just... dismissed it as a load of bollocks. The last time I saw him, at the end of January 2020, he was screaming at me in the street because I had said that maybe the diagnosis would mean that we would need to plan for the future. A wee girl from the clinic phones my mum every now and then but as my DM doesn't want social workers, there's little they can do.

I did make moves towards a hearing at the Court of Protection, but he was so angry and so aggressive that I was scared for my mum, and in the end I backed off. We were entering lockdown, I couldn't get to DM as I am the other end of the country, and we just were shut down every which way I turned at that time. I'm worried that we don't have enough medical evidence to win in the Court of Protection, and yet, we have no way of gathering more as we have no ongoing medical assessment.

DM has been with him, one to one, throughout lockdown. He won't have the vaccine. (In fact, he reckons he knows how to cure covid ). He keeps telling us that we don't need to know what he is planning. He is absolutely foul to DM, but she feels that he wouldn't manage to look after himself now and she has no option but to look after him.

He is feuding with neighbours, shouting at them, and is very irrational. We have no external support and I have no idea how to proceed.

The mental capacity test itself was... not very rigorous. My Dad will be able to count backwards from 20, I imagine on his deathbed, but he can't recognise coins or notes of money any more, and has to be reminded how to put his trousers on sometimes. The way that we initially went about it was to speak to the gp, and say that we understood that she couldn't discuss it, but these were our concerns, and then she called my dad in for a check up, and referred him on with concerns that she had noted during that consultation.

If you have any breakthroughs, or flashes of inspiration, then do let me know. Even with a diagnosis, we don't have a clear way forwards that isn't going to be horrifically unpleasant - the idea of my ill father, frail and not himself, telling the court of protection that I'm trying to steal his money, that I'm trying to kidnap him because I want to control him, and I'm a waste of space is just very sad to contemplate. Yet I can't see any other way forward.

I'm so sorry @CoffeePhoenix. That sounds incredibly difficult.

My in-laws are in another country (which is part of what makes dealing with this so difficult - I hear you on the difficulties of being far away) but it sounds like there are some similarities. Having capacity to do some things (count backwards from 20) but not others is also a factor for us. We have hoarding in the mix as well and at the moment I'm trying to work out what is the 'best' approach - go through environmental health and the council to try and get the hoarding cleaned up which will provoke an outburst of rage that perhaps will be documented, then we'll have evidence to present to the equivalent of the Court of Protection ...? The in-law is also abusing their spouse and has been doing so for literally decades which is heartbreaking to witness (and I have been excoriated over it on another thread that I posted recently to try and get advice ...). People just think that you can call police and social workers and that's the job done. It's so much more complex than that. Anyway for you and if I have any breakthroughs or insights I'll come back and post them.

@Seashore2018 it is very easy for people outside looking in to offer binary solutions - I've been pulled to bits for wanting to interfere with my parents choices on another thread of mine.

The spousal abuse adds a whole layer which makes a difficult scenario even more heartbreaking- my mum genuinely cannot accept that her wishes are as important as my dad's because he's spent years telling her that she isn't important. And she very definitely does have capacity to make decisions...

People feel better if they can offer a solution - it doesnt matter if that solution is actually appropriate or not...(i have a SEN child - the rote response is 'early intervention' and 'senco support' and if you try to explain that these solutions don't work for your child for whatever reason, the outrage that that child doesn't fit the SEN child template is real)