This reminds me a bit of what is happening to my father who is in an Alzheimer's facility and is between stages 5 and 6 Alzheimer's disease. My father, who is 88, has had a tendency to become agitated when he is frustrated, confused and can, and often is, quite troublesome (can one blame him?).

We (my sisters and brother and I) have discovered that when we do not make regularly scheduled or predictably scheduled, visits, i.e., when perhaps we pop in to see him mid-week or early morning or in the evening, he is completely doped up on seroquel and many of the other medications they give him. in those cases, he is often almost comatose versus when we visit him, say, on a regular saturday and the staff expects us.

obviously, heavily medicating him makes the staff's job much easier, although they charge additional fees for heightened attention and additional meds. the meds he certainly gets but the heightened attention is a joke.

when the facility knows to expect us to visit, it seems they reduce his dosage so that he is at least coherent to the extent that he can be given the extent of his disease. when not overly medicated he can hold a conversation, stay awake, and remember people's names. when medicated, not so much.

while an alzheimer's facility is not technically a jail, to some, like my father, it is. and the staff are his jailers.

based on discussions we have had with geriatric specialists/social workers, over-medication of alzheimer's patients is rampant.

needless to say, we are moving him to a smaller facility that accepts a maximum of 15 patients and is staffed to the extent that each patient is treated individually.

my father is lucky in that respect in that he has the funds to support this. for the great majority of alzheimer's patients now and in the future, i imagine extreme doping will continue to be the answer to the corporate megaliths who own these massive facilities and their financial bottom lines. fuck the patients, for they don't know where they are or who they are anyway. or so they think.