Jennifer Moeder
Jul 2026
My mother is an Alzheimer’s/dementia patient and was in the memory care unit at Christian Assisted Living for around 9 months.<br><br>After she had only been a resident at CAL for about 3 weeks, staff sent her to the local psychiatric hospital after an incident in which they interpreted her behavior to be threatening. Our family was told that the mental hospital was likely to release her right back to assisted living the very next day. That did not happen. They kept her there for TWO weeks, saying that they just needed to adjust her medication so that my mom would be more “easily redirected.” By the end of her stay at the psychiatric hospital, my mother was on 7 hard drugs, one of which was Risperdol, which carries a black box warning by the FDA because it carries significant mortality risk. She was put on this drug nevertheless.<br><br>If this entire event weren’t tragic enough, we were later told that my mom simply had a urinary tract infection which was likely the cause of her acting in an agitated manner in the first place, meaning that the action they took by calling an ambulance and her resulting hospital stay in which they “treated” her behavior by putting her on antipsychotic meds could have been completely unwarranted.<br><br>Before transferring her to the hospital, the people at CAL made two feeble attempts to alert a family member, but since it was late at night, they weren’t successful in that attempt, so we were not informed until the next day.<br><br>The entire event was poorly handled and resulted in the steep decline of my mom’s physical health. She was never the same after that 2-week hospital stay. She did return to CAL after that and stayed for another 6 months or so until she declined to the point that she needed to be moved to nursing home care.<br><br>The CNA’s are wonderful there; they consistently take patient and loving care of the residents, but the directors and people who make decisions regarding procedures in the handling of your loved one (and communication of said decisions) leave a lot to be desired.
