I find how the world works for senior citizens disturbing.

When I was volunteering in the psych units at Haborview, I noticed that many of the patients were comprised of elderly people. At first I thought that I just happened to be there when there was a surge of senior citizens, but then it dawned on me that the ratio of elderly patients to everyone else was unproportional. I thought that was wierd. Why would so many seniors need psychiatric treatment?

My question was finally answered when I interivewed to volunteer at the psych hospital in West Seattle. The woman told me that what happens is some seniors aquire dementia, get violent, and therefore can't be handled in regular nursing homes and are subsequently put in psych units.

I found that very disturbing.

I mean, these poor people, they used to have lives. They used to be carefree children, and then grew up and got married, and then had kids, and basically had it going on. Some of them were probably very wealthy, lived in big houses by the water. Some of them were brilliant medical doctors, PhDs, scientists. Some of them devoted their lives to children. Some of them were journalists or big time authors or freelancers.

And now this -- now these great wonderful people, good people, kind people, people who loved dogs and music and their jobs -- now they were living in the armpit of the world.

How sad is that?

And I could think about my grandpa -- my grandpa was a brilliant mathmatician, graduated with a PhD from Columbia, worked for IBM, basically was a really cool person -- now he might have to live in some old icky psych unit for the rest of his life? I mean, he loves luxury, loves the world, and now he's going to be treated like he's nothing?

What injustice! What an outrage! What an abomination!

The world can be very cruel: The people who should be treated kings are treated like dirt. Very cruel indeed.