To: The Sydney Morning Herald

Sent: Tuesday, 4 November 2003 11:50 AM

Subject: the big 'A'...

With due respect and sympathy for Hazel, I would like to offer a personal caution regarding the alarming statistics on dementia/Alzheimer's. The popular view ranking untruths from 'lies, damned lies, (to) statistics' may be cruelly simplistic, but it contains important assumptions about this bastard child of economics.

Here's my experience: some 10 years ago a Jewish milliner, a long-time friend of ours, was 'abducted' from her home, submitted to the ministrations of a so-called geriatric assessment team (GAT) in a secondary hospital and confined to a miserable aged-care facility alledgedly because of her 'dementia'.

Our friend was about 85 at the time and lived alone, but we visited her at least twice a week and spent considerable time with her. She also had the usual home visits by a nurse and meals-on-wheels. Not only was she fully 'with it' at all times, she could recall contemporary events as well as her youth in Vienna. Her health was quite good, she was able to prepare her own meals (she disliked the m-o-w fare), but above all, she was completely lucid.

Her own physician attested to this initially, but was brought to heel by what I have come to call the welfare mafia... In the old peoples home pending a Public Guardian tribunal decision, her bed displayed a doctor's assessment: "Able to see large objects" - but our friend, who had been stitching hats for (some) Sydney society dames up to this very point, proved to us there and then that she was able to read the fine print on a box of matches and correctly identify a flowering tree some 30 m from the hostel balcony.

Trying to rescue her from her predicament, I rang Harry Seidler, seeing our friend's late husband had been an architect in Vienna before fleeing the Nazis. Mr Seidler, on hearing the story, commented "this happens all the time" and suggested I talk to a chamber magistrate.

The poor woman was duly declared non compos mentis - and 'sentenced' to death in the same rough old nursing home. Her American niece, the only surviving relative, agreed before the tribunal that her aunt might last 10 years in the Jewish nursing home I'd shown her, but might not live a year in the nursing home in question. Yet she did not want to contradict the GAT experts.

The 'welfare mafia' prevailed, our friend was confined to the nursing home and drugged to the point of "shutting down" her normal responses, including speech. Asked about her silence, she sighed "the words don't come anymore" - then she was wrestled into her bed by attendants.

We felt so disheartened and powerless to help that we did not visit her again. We moved to the country. Perhaps half a year later, our friend had died. The nursing home refused to tell my wife the cause of death, or even where our friend had been buried. How many of the 160,000 people now diagnosed as "demented" may be in the same 'geriatric assessment' category?

For whose benefit?