My Grandma’s depression has just been a downward slide for the last year, and I don’t see any more ways to help. She is completely healthy (physically, no dementia) but just feels so, so lonely and nothing anyone does seems to touch it. Nothing seem to be helping, she just seems to keep getting worse and worse.
As a result of the depression, she’s basically stopped eating. She does have some confounding stomach issues too which don’t help, but the main issue is that she just ‘can’t be bothered’ to eat. In the last month she’s ended up at the hospital/having the paramedics out twice because of not eating. It’s a vicious cycle in which she doesn’t eat, so becomes more depressed and anxious, and so doesn’t want to eat. Both I and her doctor have explained this to her several times but she just doesn’t care – she doesn’t want to eat, and ‘doesn’t understand’ why she feels terrible all the time.
For the last fifteen years, my Grandma has told me “Kill me before I ever have to go into a care home”, “Never let me end up in one of those places”, “I would rather die than have to go into a home”. She had to put her mother in a nursing home due to dementia and the experience left us both traumatised and fearful towards the quality of life in care homes. Now with this depression she’s started saying ‘Just put me in a home’. I’ve resisted it because of her previously expressed wishes, and the knowledge that the environment and restrictions placed upon her in a care home would likely make her depression and loneliness much worse.
Now my uncle is pushing the idea of putting her in a home, specifically so that “the rest of us can get on with her lives and stop indulging her feeling sorry for herself”. My uncle still holds resentment for Grandma as she was the one to leave his dad in the divorce 45 years ago. My Grandad also suffered from depression for over ten years, in addition to a myriad of health issues, and my uncle did absolutely everything in his power to prevent my Grandad going into a care home.
I don’t know what to do. It feels like two against one, where I’m the last man standing by her former wishes. The not eating situation is also making me reconsider my stance, but it’s just infuriating because it feels like a self-inflicted issue and no physical basis for her to have to go into a situation that will likely make the depression worse. My view is that almost all of the things currently in place to manage her depression (visiting her friends, day trips out with them, regular exercise, going to her favourite shops, seeing her therapist) will all be limited or extinguished by her being placed in care. Knowing her character, I truly believe the restrictions to her independence would make her miserable.
I feel like I’m fighting an uphill battle here and I don’t know if it’s right any more. I don’t know what to do.
