She says she can't hear over this one who just keeps banging and making noise in her ear. She makes up stories about people knocking on her door and windows at night. I have literally tried everything to prove to her that this is all in her head including having a psychic cleanse her apartment and getting her new hearing aids. How do I know if there is a more serious issue here? I'm afraid these noises are driving her insane.
I was also wondering if hallucinations happen if an elder has an urinary tract infection [UTI]?
Well, the repercussions of doing that stunt were horrendous. It would take a couple weeks of diligent medication administration to bring her back from that state of confusion and disorientation. Once she felt better, she would refuse to take meds all over again. It was a viscious circle that was not good for her.
That's what put her on the waiting list for an assisted living room to open up in the center she lived in. She ended up skipping that completely and going right into the nursing home/24/7 care unit from skipping meds and blacking out, hitting her head.
The nursing home doc put mom on Namenda about a month before they sent her mom. I didn't know it until I got a list of her discharge meds. I asked her home doc what he thought, and he said, "Oh, why not keep her on it a while and see what happens."
Well, mom was having nightmares . . . she regularly had conversations with her dead brothers, mom, dad and sister. And a particularly amusing episode where, awake but in bed, she had a visit from Chicken Little. *sigh*
I had a baby monitor in her room when she first came home. She would talk in gutteral voices that scared the livin' DAYLIGHTS out of me. I removed the monitor. Stopped the Namenda. And now? Although she wakes up early, she doesn't talk to anybody anymore. (I thought mom had changed into that green puke girl from the Exorcist.)
I've heard much about psychotic depression, but the problems seem to be visual hallucinations, such as bugs crawling on walls. I don't know enough to know if there can also be auditory hallucinations with psychotic depression. Your mother's new doctor should be able to tell more after working with her. I hope that you can make her life more comfortable. Living with noise like that would be frightening.
I think a lot of elders fear hospitalization because it was super common when they were younger. You got hospitalized for 10 days for anything & everything, and hospitals were scary places. Now, it's too expensive to do that if the person isn't in an obvious crisis.
My advice to tide you over is don't make promises you can't keep, like don't promise her she won't have to ever go to a hospital or nursing home. Just respond that you will work with the doctor to keep her safe, no matter what. And keep reassuring her everything will turn out OK. I tell my mom quite often that we are doing our best for her.
It might be as simple as a urinary tract infection, wrong medication/med combination, advancing dementia, or any number of other neurological things that can happen. The important thing is that you are responding! Good for you!
So many people come here asking for help, and then do nothing with the information and complain nothing changes or the problem got worse. Please come back and tell us what the doctor said!
Did the doctor who prescribed Zoloft know about the hallucinations/delusions, or has that happened since? Zoloft might help the depression and that would be a good thing all around. But even if she'd take it, I'm not sure it would deal with the other mental health issues.
Some people have "pleasant" hallucinations and delusions. They just want to feed the little kids who come to their house, or worry where the bunnies go when they leave. Your mother is very distressed by the spirits and that raises the priority for dealing with it, in my mind.
If the original doc doesn't know about the "spirits," tell him or her. You may need to see a different specialist.
She isn't making up stores. She is reporting what she experiences and believes. You will NEVER be able to convince her by reason. That is the nature of hallucinations and delusions.
I wish you good luck in finding help soon.
You are NOT going to solve this with logic and explanations. If your mom has any kind of dementia, this may be a sign to you that her brain is changing and can no longer process inputs correctly. She needs to be seen ASAP, just like Littleonway said.
My mom had these very same hallucinations 15 years ago and not one person in the family picked up on the fact this is dementia related. They just wrote her off as weird and crazy instead of getting her help.