00:00 Male Speaker: Program offers general advice. It does not create an attorney-client relationship. Every person’s legal situation is unique. You should contact your attorney before taking any legal action related to the subjects discussed in this program. Welcome to Aging Insight. The only show dedicated to your elder care concerns and your resource for learning about how to manage your health, housing, financial, and legal needs. This is a live call-in program featuring John Ross and Lisa Shoalmire, elder law attorneys and senior advocates for the Ark-La-Tex. Aging Insight is dedicated to helping you navigate the challenges and blessing of growing older. So, call in and ask your questions. The number is (903)793-1071. Now, here are your hosts, John Ross and Lisa Shoal- 00:49 Lisa: Welcome, welcome everyone to another edition of Aging Insight. I’m Lisa Shoalmire. I’m here live in the studio with John Ross, and of course we’re also live on Facebook. So we got a couple of viewers out there already on Facebook. Well, shout out to you guys. Appreciate it. All you have to do, if you want to see radio being made, all you have to do is jump on Facebook and go to the Ross and Shoalmire Facebook page and you will see the box different times and watch it live. 01:26 John: Yeah, that’s our live link up and while you’re there, be sure and give our page a like and then if you like the page and every time we get on air and get on live, because we do the radio show but we also… well, occasionally do some live presentations of some of our programs that we do out in the community, lots of good information that we have out there. If you just can’t get enough with us on the radio every Saturday, there are lots of other opportunities out there. In fact, we also have the Aging Insight TV show, which if you’re-- 02:03 Lisa: You’re a local cable subscriber-- 02:05 John: … local cable subscriber. 02:06 Lisa: You can catch that on channel 10 KLFI. If you’re not a local cable subscriber or maybe you have one of those little nifties, satellite dishes, or maybe you’ve cut the cord. 02:17 John: That’s right. 02:18 Lisa: … and maybe you’re doing Apple TV or any of that stuff. I don’t even understand all that stuff John that Hulu and I don’t know. But anyway, you can catch us at aginginsight.com and we’ve got a bunch of our television shows and radio programs that there’s a topic that we’ve covered, you can scroll through and click on it and watch the television show or listen to the radio program. 02:44 John: That’s right, lots of opportunities out there to get some information. Of course, we’re able to bring you all of this information, one by dragging ourselves up here on a Saturday just for you. 02:56 Lisa: That’s right. Yeah, we talk about our weekend doesn’t really start till one o’clock on Saturday. 03:01 John: No, it really doesn’t. 03:02 Lisa: Because we’re working onto it. 03:03 John: At a minimum. 03:04 Lisa: That’s true. But the other thing is we’ve got sponsors that make sure that we’ve got some airtime to be with you all. I wanted to give a special thank you to Edgewood Manor, The Barnett Agency, Dierksen Memorial Hospice, Cowhorn Creek Estates, St. Michael’s Hospital, Red River Federal Credit Union, Twin City Rehab, and Inspirations of New Boston. 03:28 John: Yeah, thanks to all of them and thanks to all of you out who were listening. Yeah, we just couldn’t quite do it without all the sponsors making it happen. 03:39 Lisa: In this week, they always like to… I don’t know maybe to reach then maybe they’re not but we’re always out and about in different communities every week. So this week, I think it was Thursday, see I was in Kilgore, gave presentations to the Lions, the new Lions Club at Kilgore, nice group, about 40, 50 folks. I just love the Lions. 04:01 John: One of these days, we’re going to have to get you to do your Lions Club presentation program here on the radio. 04:07 Lisa: Yeah, that’ll be good. 04:08 John: Maybe one day when I’m not here. 04:10 Lisa: Sure. Yeah, I can do that for you. 04:12 John: That way you can occupy the mic. 04:15 Lisa: So, I thought that… and of course, that morning I have been in Mount Pleasant. At noon, I was in Kilgore. In the afternoon, I was in London, Texas. That day, you were in El Dorado, Arkansas and Magnolia, Arkansas. 04:27 John: Talking about the five biggest mistakes that people make in the elder law context to the El Dorado Church Christ. There’s senior group out there. 04:37 Lisa: And let me tell you, did they feed you well? 04:40 John: They did. You can count on a church people like that to have some casseroles and some pie. 04:46 Lisa: Right. 04:47 John: I had both and-- 04:49 Lisa: A plenty. 04:50 John: ..and several of the latter. 04:51 Lisa: And several of slices of pie, yes. That’s the way to John’s heart. Any of the group that might invite him to come speak… there you go. Let’s see. One of our other attorneys was out in Greenville, Texas that day. This was all one day, just one day. We were everywhere from El Dorado, Arkansas to Greenville, Texas and a lot of places in between. 05:16 John: Yeah, that’s how we roll. Of course, there’s just a lot of folks out there that need this kind of information and that’s why we do it. 05:23 Lisa: Yeah. If you’re listening on the radio, then I guarantee there will be a time where we will be visiting in your community. If you have a chance, we’d love to see you. We also love it when people come up and say, “Heard you on the radio,” or “I heard that story on the radio and it was really, really good story.” That kind of thing, love it. 05:43 John: Yeah, well, the other thing that was going on this week was the senior events thing that they did. 05:52 Lisa: Yeah, the Senior Day In The Park. 05:53 John: Yeah, Senior Day In The Park. 05:54 Lisa: The Dierksen Hospice puts that on-- 05:57 John: Yeah, one of the sponsors. 05:57 Lisa: … along with a lot of other folks. 05:58 John: Yeah, and of course, the big thing issue was that this was happening in the same time that they’re also doing the Elder Abuse Awareness Month. That’s a big program that’s put on by Adault Protective Services. 06:14 Lisa: Right, our area, John, I will have to say our area has not really focused much on the elder abuse aspect. Sadly, we know we live in a world that is so imperfect and we have children that are the victims of abuse and neglect and folks are pretty aware of that circumstance. We got you on the CPS and CASA and all the organizations that are there foster children and to support the fight against child abuse. There’s the biker group, bikers child… 06:52 John: Yeah, Bikers Against Child Abuse, BACA… 06:56 Lisa: Yeah, so the elder side of the spectrum unfortunately, horribly, there are also abuse issues for our seniors. 07:06 John: Yeah, and you know, there’s no bikers against elder abuse that I’m aware of. 07:11 Lisa: I think we should start one. 07:13 John: We would have to get bikes. 07:14 Lisa: That would be the start. So, real quickly though, comment from our Facebook Live because we can see your comments while we’re on the radio. 07:23 John: Yeah. 07:23 Lisa: Someone saying it was good to-- 07:27 John: Good to see you last night at the Opportunities Inc Big Bass Classic Fundraiser. 07:32 Lisa: Yeah. We were out last night enjoying some barbeque out at the Fairgrounds, Four States Fairgrounds supporting Opportunities. They have senior day center, John. 07:41 John: They do have a senior day center. It’s fantastic program out there. 07:45 Lisa: Anyway, we try to get out there and support the different organizations that are supporting our seniors in the community, so-- 07:54 John: Absolutely. 07:55 Lisa: There was free barbeque. 07:56 John: There was free barbeque or depends on how you define free. 08:01 Lisa: Well, that’s true. 08:02 John: Because they also had a live auction and-- 08:04 Lisa: You “won” something at the auction. 08:07 John: I… yes, “won something.” 08:09 Lisa: I love that. I won something at the auction and I think winning is you wrote that largest check for the item. 08:17 John: Yes, but I still won, so that’s all that matters. 08:20 Lisa: That’s right. You went home with something. 08:21 John: That’s right, several something as a matter of fact-- 08:24 Lisa: We kind of went into this… they had the Senior Day at The Park at Spring Lake Park and this year we’ve Bowie County and Gregg County and several of our East Texas counties have really stepped up their awareness campaigns and their efforts in the area of elder abuse. 08:45 John: Yeah, absolutely. 08:46 Lisa: With that, John, we actually have an active elder abuse board that’s now active in our Bowie County in East Texas area. 08:56 John: Yeah, and this is not a new invention overall. There’s already been these similar boards down in the Longview and the Tyler region. As a matter of fact, one of our employees, Stacey, down in our Longview area has been on the Adult Protective Services board, community board down there for quite a lot. 09:21 Lisa: In our area for some reason there’s been a bit of a drought in being active in raising awareness and procuring resources for those victims of senior fraud and abuse and elder abuse. The month of May is it’s elder abuse awareness month and so I know at the Courthouse last Tuesday in New Boston, Texas the county judge, Judge James Carlow as well as members of that APS court were out there and proclamation was made to raise awareness about elder abuse issues and so the month is starting with the bang as far as it goes. 10:11 John: That’s right. We kind of thought maybe we would just talk about it a little bit on the show today. For those of you out who were listening last weekend, we talked about the fact that the prior to last weekend, there had been some storms and the radio station took a hit. 10:32 Lisa: Oh, yeah. Probably you remind everybody about that. 10:35 John: Took a hit and because of that-- 10:38 Lisa: You mean John metal towers that protruded to the sky are at risk for being hit by lightning. 10:45 John: Sure enough. Sure enough, but apparently, according to our production staff, they let us know that we would not be able to take phone calls last weekend and so we weren’t able to take any phone calls and to be honest, we got them here today and Lisa and I are running the show on ourselves. 11:06 Lisa: Yeah. Where’s the production staff? 11:07 John: I don’t know where the production staff is, but one thing I do not know is whether or not we can take any phone calls. So, if you call, we will-- 11:16 Lisa: If we can answer, we will. 11:18 John: If we can, we will, but I cannot make any promises that that will actually happen. 11:23 Lisa: Yeah, if you call and you don’t get us, we’re not ignoring you. We probably just don’t know you’re calling because something is out with the equipment. 11:29 John: Yeah, that’s exactly right. So, anyway, we’re going to be talking about elder abuse and elder abuse can actually come in lots of different forms. 11:38 Lisa: It does come in a lot forms and John, I want to talk about some of the different categories because there’s a few of them that are pretty obvious and there’s a few of them that aren’t. So, one of the more obvious categories is straight physical abuse of a person 65 years or older. 11:56 John: Sure. Well, and of course, that sounds obvious and I guess, yeah, if you’re hitting somebody— 12:05 Lisa: Sure. 12:06 John: Yes, but, oftentimes, when we start dealing with the elderly, you can also… with things like dementia and other mental illness what Lisa likes to call brain failure. 12:22 Lisa: Yes, it’s brain failure. That’s right. Everybody, we all understand what heart failure is. When we start talking about dementia or common decline, I’d like to kind of call it brain failure because I think people get the concept a lot better than when you just say dementia. 12:38 John: That’s right. I’ll make an analogy here. When my parents first moved to San Marcos, Texas and I was a young boy and we moved into this neighborhood and down the street from me was another boy. His name was Blaine and Blaine was a year older than me and Blaine was kind of a wild kid and he liked to ride bicycles. He liked to ride skateboards and he introduced me to the world of bicycles and skateboards. 13:09 Lisa: Ramps and all sorts of things. 13:10 John: And ramps and trying to jump things and ride through trees and all kinds of stuff and at one point, I mean… of course, when you do that, you get hurt pretty regularly. You’re falling-- 13:22 Lisa: Yeah, skin some knees, elbows-- 13:24 John: You’re skinning some knees. You’re hurting yourself on pretty regular basis. Well, when I entered first grade shortly into my time there in the first grade, my parents got called to the school. They were investigating possible abuse of little John Ross. I was so beat up on such a regular basis from the skinning and the bicycle rakes and those things-- 13:56 Lisa: Yes, the things that our current children do know less about. 14:00 John: Yes, right. I was playing outside. This was real activity and not VR activity. No virtual skateboarding. This was real skateboarding. But the thing was… and once it was all explained, it was really no big deal. 14:15 Lisa: Luckily. 14:16 John: Luckily. Ironically enough, the young man, Blaine… the teacher who have called my parents in to talk about the possible child abuse, she also had a boy my age and shortly after first grade, my friend Blaine moved next door to her. 14:36 Lisa: Then all of a sudden the bruising and the-- 14:39 John: Yeah, and all of a sudden, it was her kid who was getting bruised and scratched. But-- 14:42 Lisa: Keep up with Blaine. 14:43 John: But when you talk about physical abuse, one thing about being elderly is oftentimes you bruise easily. 14:52 Lisa: Yeah, you might be taking some medications that cause you to show just a bruise—I mean so medications can make you a lot more susceptible to looking as if you’re a victim of abuse. 15:07 John: That’s right and it can be possible for somebody to be hurting themselves, again particularly if you start talking about things like dementia. The thing is that if you’re the outsider and you’re not entirely sure what’s going on but you can look for some of those signs. Just like that teacher, she was airing on the side of being precautions and ultimately, it turns into a funny story 40 something years later. But, had there actually been some danger there to that young little redheaded kid that might have been a lifesaving move on her part. Yeah, you can. Again, physical abuse seems the obvious when you think about it, yeah, somebody’s getting punched or kicked or whatever, but because especially in the elder population, it can be masked by some of these other things just like a rambunctious young boy can get hurt on his own pretty easily so can the elderly, but it still always a good idea to be cautious out there and air on the side of involvement. 16:23 Lisa: Right, till we get to the end of today show, John, we’re going to talk about what your responsibilities might would be if you suspect or conscerneded about abuse. But I guess it’s time for us to take our first commercial break. So, we’ll go to break and we’ll come back and still talk about some of these signs to raise awareness of elder abuse. 16:44 Male Speaker: With John Ross and Lisa Shoalmire. Have a question? Call (903) 793-1071. More Aging Insight in a moment. 16:54 John: All right, so if we’re off the live feed but we’re still on this live feed. 16:58 Lisa: Right, and John, when you’re telling that story, it was reminding me about you had a client whose wife had dementia and she’s very frail and she took maybe anticoagulant drugs-- 17:14 John: Yeah, a lot of times the heart medicine they can keep you from clotting and things that the blood thinners and so if you also see a lot of times with liver problem where you get a lot bruising easy. 17:25 Lisa: Yes, so I remember this husband who was taking care of his wife. She would fall and he would pick her back up and just his grip on her arm or something would often leave a mark if you remember. 17:45 John: Yeah, if you can see handprints on somebody that can certainly give you some cause to think that maybe they’re being hurt. 17:52 Lisa: As I recall that most of issue that they had to address because they did have a concern person who saw those prints and hand marks and thought it might be something more. 18:04 John: Yeah. You just got to be cautious out there and look around and like I said just… I know my parents they told that story several times about how Blaine, the instigator, had ultimately and then moving next to the same teacher and influencing her boy. In fact, the teacher had called at one point and she called my parents separately. This was several years later and she said, “So, I get it now. I understand.” Anyway, actually still friends with Blaine on Facebook. 18:46 Lisa: Facebook, there you go. 18:47 John: You can keep around your friends for a long time. It’s like kind of a neat thing about some of those technology. You may not use it all the time, but it does do some neat stuff out there. We got about 20 seconds until we comeback from our first commercial break here. Keep talking about the different types of elder abuse. Again, if anybody ever… even if you have comments later, you always put them on there. 19:24 Male Speaker: Have a question? Call (903) 793-1071. Now, back to Aging Insight with John and Lisa. 19:33 John: Welcome back to Aging Insight everybody. This is your host, John Ross here in the studio with Lisa Shoalmire and in our support for elder abuse awareness month and in effort to support some of the stuff that Bowie County has done in setting all of this up along with Texas Adult Protective Services, we thought we do our little radio show today and talk a little bit about this and we were talking about some different types. 20:03 Lisa: Right and so we kind of talk about physical abuse which most people… John and in these days with granny cams, you know. Here we are on Facebook where folks can see us live right now. There are granny cams that I have adult children clients who maybe they have hired caregivers for their parents while they’re at work and they’ve set up some granny cams which are just basically hidden cameras that record what’s going on and while we have not had any clients come back with any terrible abuse scenarios. You go to internet and you’ll see-- 20:47 John: There you can find lots of them out there. 20:49 Lisa: … where folks have had granny cams and they realized that a caregiver was physically abusing, so I think hey, technologies are great thing. It’s a great way. If you’re an adult child taking care of your parent and you’re hiring caregivers that you may not really know other than this new journey of hiring caregivers for a parent, granny cams is a great idea. 21:13 John: Absolutely and of course along with physical abuse goes with the sexual abuse which is unfortunately quite rampant. 21:22 Lisa: Yes, so for the wireless nurse, I guess we’ll go in too much detail but it is an issue and I know many of you might be scratching their heads going, “That is just completely unbelievable.” But the intimate assault of a senior is a thing. 21:44 John: Yes and it’s apparently relatively rampant in many cases. You’re often dealing with people who cannot report so much like abuse of a child where children are either cannot vocalize what has happened to them or they’re easily intimidated. You get the same vulnerability in that elderly person which makes them a crime target, a right target for such a thing. 22:15 Lisa: One of the things that I had come up in that air because unfortunately John it is so rampant that we have in fact had a client and fairly recently that his wife was in nursing facility and one of the workers at that nursing facility, she had dementia, very advanced, and apparently had abused his wife. Luckily, he did not need a criminal attorney but his wife had… wasn’t able to really communicate and it was actually another worker at the facility that took him aside and explained what happened. 22:56 John: Yeah and who had reported it. 22:58 Lisa: Right, and who had reported it. 23:01 John: So, yeah, it does happen and—so, yeah. Again, you may necessarily think about but it’s out there. Of course, there’s lots of different types and we’re going talk about several and some of the reporting requirements when we come back from our news break. So, stick around. We’ll be right back. 23:37 Now, Facebook people if you’re watching this later, one thing what we did we didn’t talk about today but we did do a whole episode on the past was actually a case up in I believe those in Cleveland maybe if I remember correctly. It’s been two or three years since we talked about it but it was a blended family situation. The wife had Alzheimer’s and she was in a facility and her husband who had cared for her for years and even while she went in to the facility would get up every morning and go to the facility and he would stay with her all day long and then he would go back home in the evenings and she had kids from a prior marriage-- 24:21 Lisa: Right, couple daughters. 24:23 John: Yeah, couple daughters and apparently, there was at least the allegation that he was continuing a sexual relationship with his wife. He said that she appreciated that intimacy and that they still bonded in that way. The kid had the feeling that she lacked the mental capacity to consent to sexual contact and because she could not consent to sexual contact then that was raped. 25:00 Lisa: Right, and so used to John long time ago there was laws on the books that says there could be no rape between a husband and a wife. 25:09 John: Right. 25:10 Lisa: But those laws are gone. 25:11 John: They have been gone for a long time. 25:12 Lisa: Yes. In this situation, the daughters got medical documentation that their mom could not consent to this type of activity and then they brought it to the district attorney in the county where they lived and the district attorney actually filed raped charges, criminal rape charges against the husband in that case. 25:37 John: Yeah. The whole thing was a bit crazy in which you could tell in reading behind all of this that that in large part was this was a very dysfunctional blended family circumstance. 25:50 Lisa: Right, well, it appeared that the daughters, their mom had been married to their dad for 40 plus years. Dad died and then mom reconnected with this gentleman at church and they got married and had a wonderful sons, you know, senior marriage until she went into dementia. 26:12 John: Yeah, the kids just could not handle the idea of their mother remarrying. They were apparently mad about it from the get-go and then as mom progressed into dementia that really gave them their opportunity to strike back at the new spouse who they thought really bad at. 26:37 Lisa: Right, and it went to trial. 26:39 John: It did go to trial. 26:39 Lisa: It went to trial, so this gentleman stood trial for sexual assault of his wife based on the fact that her dementia was in advanced stage that she could not consent and I believe he was acquitted. 26:51 John: He was acquitted and after all of that, but it’s one of those things where even if your acquitted from a crime like that that doesn’t change the fact that you probably been out tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and not to mention just the stress. I mean imagine being a 75-year-old facing what could be essentially a life sentence in prison for something that you feel like you did not do wrong. And again, then you certainly some questions in all of that. 27:30 Lisa: Right. His reputation… I mean bowel counts. He was an outstanding member of the community both of these husband and wife were. An acquittal is poor satis-- 27:43 John: Yeah, it’s better than going to prison. 27:43 Lisa: It’s poor outcome. 27:45 John: Better than going to prison. All right, we’re going back in three seconds here. 27:51 Male Speaker: Have a question? Call 903 793-1071. Now, back to Aging Insight with John and Lisa. 28:00 Lisa: All right, everyone, welcome back to Aging Insight. This is Lisa Shoalmire here with you live in the studio with John Ross and John I’m guessing the bones are out. 28:10 John: Well, they may very well be. I don’t know. 28:13 Lisa: Yeah, so anyway, but today we are raising awareness as the Adult Protective Services in East Texas is trying to do in the month of May to raise awareness for issues surrounding elder abuse in fraud, and neglect, and all those terrible, negative, awful things that we wish we didn’t have to devote an hour of radio time to even talk about because I wish it just wasn’t the thing. 28:38 John: Well, and it’s not the first time we’ve talked about it and at least several different context. 28:44 Lisa: We’ve talked about couple of more obvious types of abuse that people can be aware physical abuse to the senior or sexual abuse intimate abuse of the senior. I would say probably one of the biggest areas of abuse that we see is something that you would call passive neglect and you know John a lot of times as people get older, they are unable to do as much for themselves. They’re unable to procure things like groceries and medications and maybe their driving ability or their cleaning ability to keep their space clean, their clothes clean up. Those things diminish. 29:28 John: They do and, yeah, typically with this type of elder abuse so often what we’re actually talking about is elder abuse of the self. 29:40 Lisa: That is considered a segment of elder abuse that APS does take them to understand, so self-neglect. It’s not just an outsider doing something to the senior. It’s the senior neglecting themselves either through inability to provide those basics for themselves or just plain unwillingness to do so. 30:06 John: Now, one question that I had get often particularly from the children is that they’ll say, “Oh, you know, my dad he lives out on the farm. He has got into the point now where he’s been barely even get around. He can’t drive very well. The house is a disaster. There’s rotten food. There’s bubbly fluids.” There’s--- 30:29 Lisa: Vermin. 30:30 John: There’s vermin. It’s a disgusting, awful, filthy situation but he refuses any assistance whatsoever and many cases can be downright-- 30:44 Lisa: Beleaguering. 30:44 John: Beleaguering and to the point of threatening if anybody offers any help and what the kids will ask me is if we’re saying that passive neglect just letting somebody be out there is a form of elder abuse. Their question and in many cases they have been told. 31:04 Lisa: They have been told by APS. 31:05 John: Or somebody else that they could be held liable in some form, either criminally or something for letting that situation continue. 31:19 Lisa: That’s a really tough area, John, because one of the things that comes up about that is we all understand that from a child perspective. That any child under the age of 18, there are parents who are legally responsible to provide the basics of life in a safe and stable home environment where that child has food, clothing, shelter, education, and medical care, and we all understand that the parents of that child is responsible for things at least until the child is 18. 31:55 John: That’s right. 31:57 Lisa: But again, let’s go to other side of the spectrum, if your parent is 85 and of course—if I got a room full of 85-year-olds, they would all be very different. 32:11 John: Absolutely. You would have some that are in great shape. 32:13 Lisa: Yes, some that just came out the golf course. 32:15 John: Yeah, better shape than us. That’s exactly right. 32:17 Lisa: Then we have some that are really confined with the wheelchair, their bed, or whatever. The question here is, is that adult child now legally responsible person for their senior parent who may not be able to take care of themselves? 32:40 John: Right and regardless of whether… and not talking about it from a moral context or the religious context, but speaking purely from a legal context. Once you have an adult, that adult is responsible for themselves and so if there’s lots of people in Texarkana right now who are adults, who are probably self-neglected. 33:06 Lisa: Right. They don’t eat right. They don’t take their medicine in the right schedule, etc., etc. 33:13 John: Yeah, you don’t know anything about them. You don’t even know that these people are out there. You don’t know that they exist and because of that you have no personal responsibility for their well-being and that’s because they’re adults. Your adult and there’s no relationship here. Now, the same thing generally goes with the kid in the sense that the kid has no legal obligation to care for the parent or to shelter them or to protect them from themselves or things like that. Now, that’s a different question to whether or not they have to report an incident of abuse that they are aware of. 33:55 Lisa: Right. That gets into those things. I’ve had adult children in the office who would talk about maybe their parent who’s now aged and suffering from some age-related issues and John, I forgot this one lady, she came in and she asked, “Am I legally responsible for my mother, who she’s obviously on dementia but am I legally responsible? Then, the answer was no. Legally, your mom is an adult. You’re an adult to the extent that you are not aware of any particular instance of abuse or neglect, you are not legally responsible to provide food, clothing, shelter that kind of thing for your parent. This adult child response was, “You know, I’m really struggling and none of my siblings will have anything to do with his parents because when we were children, our mom was an abusive, horrible, awful person. She was an alcoholic and as soon as all of us could get away from home, we did. Now, she’s suffering what for me is age-related issues and none of my siblings would help at all and so I’m really struggling whether I should at least step in.” 35:17 John: Right. 35:18 Lisa: That’s a tough spot. 35:19 John: Sure and again, there’s a moral quandary that she has there but not necessarily a legal quandary. 35:28 Lisa: We do not have what they call filial responsibility laws. 35:32 John: There’s no filial responsibility around here. Now, I believe maybe Pennsylvania and a couple other states. But there’s only two or four, six and they’re all Yankee states anyway. So you don’t have to worry about it. 35:48 Lisa: Now, so that’s one area. Passive neglect can be a point that APS will come in. If you got that parent that is stubbornly wanting to live in that [36:03Berman Field House], that might be something you will talk about recording. 36:11 John: Sure. 36:12 Lisa: I guess we’ve got a couple of other areas to cover that we start seeing here in our area, so but what we’ll do is we’ll come back from our last break and we’ll cover the last one of exploitation that we see. 36:36 Male Speaker: (903) 93-1071 to ask your question. 36:41 John: Internal sound for you all so you can hear what we hear. But I don’t figure you want to hear the commercials. 36:46 Lisa: Right. Hey, they didn’t pay to be on the commercials. They didn’t pay to be on Facebook. 36:51 John: That’s exactly right. So now if you want to be a Facebook Live sponsor-- 36:57 Lisa: I bet we could hook you up with some… 36:58 John: I bet we could hook you up with some. 36:59 Lisa: We will sign or something. 37:00 John: Yeah, that’s right. We’ll wear your t-shirt or something. We need clothing sponsors. So we like to do on the news. This is Shoalmire wardrobe provided by-- 37:16 Lisa: That’s got banned wide on the… 37:18 John: Yeah, yeah, on the wheel. That’s exactly right. Yes, so the passive neglect again you don’t have any real liabilities there. If somebody is an adult with pretty much they’re free to do what they want to do even if doing what they want to do endangers their own life, I mean you can go to the boats and gamble all your savings away. You can jump out of an airplane and risk your life on a 20 feet piece of silk. Those things may or may not be good ideas but you can do them if you want to and if the same sort of thing in this-- 38:02 Lisa: Yeah, and a lot of times when we have on that is we have adult children that live away. 38:07 John: Right. 38:08 Lisa: They see when they come visit mom and dad that there’s a lot of issues in the house and mom and dad can’t get around and keep it clean and but then the adult kids are living in the big city hours away. 38:22 John: What makes me mad is when the kids do actually report it and then re-investigating people tell the kids that they’re going to be personally responsible if they don’t step in which is wrong. That’s actually a complete lie and there’s no basis for it whatsoever. But, you know, sometimes it seems the reporting agencies don’t really have a good solution. 38:44 Lisa: Right. 38:44 John: They’re trying to push the solution off onto somebody else even though that’s not really their responsibility. These are tough situations in many faces, so it’s not always just as easy as… it all sounds easy from the outside but when you’re actually doing it, that it’s extremely difficult to try to figure out some of this. All right, four more seconds. 39:13 Male Speaker: Question? call (903) 793-1071. Now, back to Aging Insight with John and-- 39:21 John: Welcome back to Aging Insight everybody. This is your host, John Ross, here with Lisa Shoalmire. We’re on our last segment today as we talk about elder abuse in our way to try to raise some awareness for Elder Abuse Awareness Month. 39:35 Lisa: Yes. Just getting there and feel empowered if you’re well aware. We‘ve talked about physical abuse or sexual abuse or passive neglect. One area that is also considered abuse is and this is pretty obvious but that is willful deprivation of—and this means that the caregiver is denying an older adult their medication, care, shelter, food, their therapeutic device, if they need a cane or walker to walk and the caregiver has gotten all mad and has put the walker on the other side of the room and is taunting the senior, “Well, you can’t do anything because your walker is over here and I’m not going bring it to you.” Obviously, this is willful deprivation and that exposes that senior to risk of physical harm. I mean if you don’t have your walker and you need it and you get up out of your chair and you fall and break a hip and-- 40:41 John: I would say that of some of the more egregious elder abuse situations that I’ve seen, I think that we’ve seen, I think a lot of them do come in this form. 40:54 Lisa: Right, particularly if you have—we often get that caregiver who is—get it, I mean caregiving for a senior is an incredibly stressful job that you’re doing and so sometimes people lose sight of what’s going on here and they just really descend into this power plays and we’ve seen where a caregiver wants the senior to sign over their property or put them on checking account or do something like that and they will threaten or actually deprive the senior of their medications or of whatever until the senior complies to their request. 41:43 John: Well, I mean, we have the situation with the gentleman that was confined to a wheelchair because of his Parkinson’s disease. The wife who I think through frankly some mental illness of her own, she was so frustrated with his inability to do anything for himself that she would take his pills and throw them at him. 42:06 Lisa: Right, so your pills taking --- 42:08 John: Yeah. Here you go and just throw them at him and he was left to essentially flock himself out of his wheelchair and scrabble across the floor trying to pick up his pills if he wanted to take it. Yeah, we’ve seen some relatively egregious forms in the willful deprivation all the way down to the situations where I know listen I will both convince in a couple situations where they were just basically thinking that if they could do it long enough, then they could kill the person. 42:44 Lisa: Right. Yeah. I had a case where a senior with dementia was also diabetic that his wife and her child were… they’re another blended family situation. They were not properly testing or administering his diabetes medications and we think they were doing that and trying to speed his demise. 43:07 John: Adding that to the cake and everything else--- 43:11 Lisa: Yes. Willful deprivation is an area and John confinement of the senior is also an area of elder abuse. They keep confine a senior in such a way where they are restrained. We have seen this because people somehow just don’t have the education to know what to do with someone who maybe—there may be a stage in dementia where they are wandering person. 43:41 John: Sure. 43:42 Lisa: We’ve seen situations where people have literally tied a senior to their bedframe so they wouldn’t get up in the night and wander and if the person who shower in sleep. Obviously, confinement is a type of abuse. Confinement can also just be isolating that person. When you are free to visit with whomever you would like to visit with as an adult person and we have seen seniors and disabled be deprived of cell phones, be deprived of visitors who attempted to visit with that senior where a caregiver has declined and disallowed any contact. 44:27 John: Sure. We’ve done a previous program that Lisa and I called the abusers playbook and one of the key elements in an abuser playbook is isolation. That’s a fundamental part of being able to successfully abuse somebody. Because if you’re around other people, then it’s going to get reported and so, yeah, that isolation that is a form… that alone is a form of elder abuse and it’s usually a sign of a greater abuse. 45:06 Lisa: Right. There’s other things going on there. 45:07 John: Either in the physical, sexual, or financial, or all of the above sort of categories. Yes, certainly anytime you see isolation as a form of confinement that should really be raising the hairs on the back of your head. 45:24 Lisa: Right. That usually comes in, you stop by to see your friend from Sundays school and the caregiver says, “Oh, they’re resting.” 45:32 John: Right and they’re always resting. 45:33 Lisa: But to the next eight times you stop by, they’re always resting. One or two or three times maybe but you kind of got to make a pass at yourself at that point and I tell people all the time for seniors and for those in that cohort, in that age group, look out for each other. Check on each other. 45:54 John: Absolutely. Yeah, when they stop showing up for their routine activities and things like that, a lot of times those are early warning signs. 46:03 Lisa: John I guess one of the final areas of exploitation that we see is of course financial exploitation. 46:09 John: Yeah and unfortunately, I would say that if you’re a prosecutor, if you’re a criminal prosecutor, oftentimes physical abuse is much easier to prosecute. 46:23 Lisa: Right, than financial abuse because John so often the way the financial abuse works is the senior oftentimes folks come around when they’re asking for something. When your grandkids show up and visit with you, but then before they leave, they’re asking for some money. But as a senior, you were so glad they were there and so glad they’re checking on you that you’re willing to hand over whatever they’re asking for and that gets to be a pattern and we had one financial abuse case. We had essentially… John, what do seniors have that younger people don’t have is a pension check. 47:03 John: Yeah, regular recurring income. 47:05 Lisa: Right, social security pension. And so we had a case where a granddaughter was reporting to be a good caregiver for grandma and essentially, what she did is she got a debit card on grandma’s accounts and so whenever that social security check will get on the third of the month, granddaughter was out at the mall and she was buying some going out clothes and so going out, lingerie, and boy, go into Chili’s and to the Honky Tonk and till the money was gone. Grandma wasn’t the one out at Victoria’s Secret buy that lingerie. I can assure you that. We did bring that to the attention and we ended up bringing that to court. But so, financial exploitation it can be—and at one time, John, the senior doesn’t even quite understand maybe that they’re being exploited. 48:04 John: Right, sure. 48:05 Lisa: That’s where your prosecutor has a hard case. 48:07 John: That’s right and that’s why a lot of times these things will end up getting resolved more in a civil court fashion than they will on a criminal side because the burden unfortunately is just too high in many cases to prosecute a financial abuser because the victim themselves are often essentially a co-conspirator in their own abuse. 48:32 Lisa: Right. They don’t want to see a grandchild be prosecuted. I had one where grandchild kept telling grandma she was going to college. She’s going to nursing school and so at the beginning of every semester, she’ll get three or four thousand dollars from grandma for her tuition and books, but she wasn’t going to school. 48:49 John: Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean you get those sort of situations and those are often where you going to end up in order to stop it, you’re going to end up having to get lawyers involved on the civil side and do things like either guardianship type situations or putting in some sort of financial blocks creating maybe a trust or something that has a third party that’s administering some of those assets so that they’re not accessible by either the abuser or the victim. 49:25 Lisa: Right. So John, the deal here is that elder abuse is a felony. 49:30 John: It is. 49:32 Lisa: So now, what degree felony depends on the circumstances but it is a felony. But something for our listeners to know is that failure to report elder abuse of a person 65 years or older is a misdemeanor. 49:47 John: Right. 49:48 Lisa: Or state jail felony depending on the extent of the abuse and senior knowledge. 49:54 John: Right, sure. 49:55 Lisa: Any person who suspects some type of elderly senior abuse situation of a person of the age 65 is what we call a mandatory reporter. They’re supposed to call the hotline or get online. There’s a way to make report anonymously to Adult Protective Services and whatever state you live in and you’re supposed to do that. 50:20 John: That’s right. Damn! The beauty of it that there’s no… if it’s ultimately found out to not be abused in someone shared before, you personally are not liable for that. You as the reporter are protected. 50:38 Lisa: Right. You are new from civil or criminal liability because sometimes you can report anonymously but if that senior doesn’t have a very big circle of contacts, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out maybe who reported the suspected abuse but there are no possible civil or criminal penalties against you as a reporter of that suspected abuse even if no such abuse is found. 51:08 John: Yeah. The only way you can be brought to any under of that sort of style is where you’re making false reports. And we’ve had this too. 51:18 Lisa: Yes, we have. 51:19 John: But even though I found most prosecutors unwilling to prosecute even where you’ve been known false reports because ultimately as a society we don’t want to desensitize people from reporter. 51:38 Lisa: Right. We discourage that, so the idea here is a lot of times we’re so trained to stay out of people’s business but when it comes whether it’s a three-year-old or 83-year-old who cannot take care of themselves this is a time for you to step outside of your comfort zone a little bit and report if it’s snuggling in the back of your mind that something is not right, report it. 52:09 John: Report. Yeah, you got to do it out there and keep a look out. Look for all these signs, educate yourself, and talk to other people about it. Get involved with organizations, whatever you can do. We need you out there to help us and help APS and help all of the organizations that are out there. 52:32 Lisa: Hey, we’re all getting older. We need safe communities and a safe way to age. 52:37 John: That’s exactly right. We got to protect each other. We got to look out for each other. Happy Mother’s Day to everybody including my own mother. We’ll see you all next weekend. Bye-bye. 52:48 Lisa: Bye-bye. 52:54 All right. We appreciate you all listening today and watching and catch up with us later. You can always check out aginginsight.com where you can see other programs and we’re always glad for you to comment on today’s show. We will always see that even if it’s days or weeks later. 53:13 John: That’s right. We’ll see you later. Bye.