My nan has not had any sort of mental health diagnosis. She has deep depression (and has talked about wanting to commit suicide to various family members), combined with memory loss and probable dementia-type symptoms. She's also likely got cancer after some recent test results.
It has been absolutely impossible to get her GPs to take any notice of any of this during COVID. She has been living by herself for over a decade since her husband died and has been increasingly down and lonely, deeply exacerbated by COVID and visiting restrictions.
In the past month, my nan has sharply deteriorated. Neighbours have noticed that she is going outside when no one is there and shouting to go away. She is trying to go to church on the wrong day and finding it locked, whilst leaving her house keys in the house and back door unlocked. She is eating very little, listening to music where previously she's wanted to chat to visitors, and having toilet accidents. However, she is still communicative, despite her memory loss of things like days and events, and able to make her own meals - just isn't choosing to do so. We are possibly unfortunately already past the power of attorney stage. I am one stage removed from this, being a granddaughter, so I don't have much control or oversight of the legal process.
Our family are very worried about her. The GP may as well not exist, they are that inept and have done nothing. She is having a memory assessment but not for a couple of weeks, everything is taking a very long time to start to be assessed. My mum is crumbling emotionally and not good at dealing with this situation so I am mainly trying to support her. I can't see us immediately getting carers and other things in place because of how difficult it is to contact services and their backlogs, and we don't have loads of money to go private, but personally I think nan probably wants to go via her own means before all of that happens.
Put simply: what do we do? Thank you so much for reading.