The “Elder Abuse: Learn the Signs and Break the Silence” video focuses on how adult children can be abusive or cruel to their elderly parents. Unfortunately, there are indeed many ways to offend a senior. Adults are often so busy with their affairs that they do not want to find the time and energy to properly and tenderly take care of their fading parents. Moreover, some people grow up with no moral values, so they allow themselves to steal from their elderly fathers and mothers, threaten or starve them, or lie to them about medications.
The video presents three scenes of elderly abuse. The first situation shows an adult man who deprives his senior mother with limited walking abilities of communication with other people. The man also lies to those who want to visit his mother and tells them that she is too tired and sick to see anyone. What is more terrible is that he tries to make his senior mother sign the house over to him. This is an act of emotional abuse and material exploitation – by depriving the elderly women of communication, the man tries to get what he wants.
The second situation shows a woman who steals from her senior mother. While the latter does not want to deal with banks and trusts her daughter to get cash, the adult woman takes all the money and says that the credit card is empty. This is an example of financial exploitation. Finally, in the third scenario, the adult woman and her son do not feed their senior relative and give him extra peels to make him sleep longer. This situation shows the case of abandonment and neglect. It is quite difficult to remain indifferent and not report all these cases. However, if I witnessed the three of them and could only report one of them, that would be the third. While the first and second scenarios are very terrible, the one in which a senior is made to take extra pills is the most disturbing. It is very dangerous to give an older person more medications than prescribed and then leave them sleeping alone. Anything can happen during their sleep, so I would report such a situation to save the senior’s life.