Sorry if this is not the right place for this. I checked the family part of the wiki but it's empty. And I realize this post has a lot of non-financial baggage, so I've tried to put the financial stuff in bold.
My 69-year-old father lives by himself (same apartment for over a decade) and over the past few years has become increasingly hostile, paranoid, and detached from reality. He think his neighbors and other people in his town are spying on him, harassing him, etc. in ways that clearly don't make sense (like they are teleporting invisibly into his apartment). He regularly contacts the police to file police reports about these things, but so far they have not contacted me. I have asked them several times to do a welfare check, and each time they show up and he refuses to open the door, so they leave.
He is retired and has alienated all his former friends/acquaintances. His family (myself included) live clear across the country. He is taking medicare but not social security. I think he has enough retirement money to live for a few more years with his current lifestyle, which is not extravagant but also not spartan.
Now my landlord has contacted me several times to ask what I intend to do about this situation. This is because my father has been bugging the landlord about the neighbors, and also because the landlord is not happy with the current state of the apartment.
I have no answer to give the landlord because I have no idea what to do. Even if I did, I don't know what it would look like financially and how I can make it work without my father and/or myself becoming indigent.
So far:
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I have asked/demanded of him to see a psychiatrist. He won't.
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I talked to a senior planner who said that the first step was going to be getting him temporarily involuntarily committed so that he could be psychiatrically evaluated, which would likely result in some kind of diagnosis. I was told medicare would pay for a few weeks of this. After this point I don't understand what happens - the psychiatric hold ends and he is chucked on the street? I am not sure he would agree to move into an assisted living facility - I have no idea exactly how he would react but I can imagine it would involve extreme agitation and refusal to go. What kind of facility handles seniors who are not willing to live there of their own volition? How are they paid for?
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I talked to the community health services department for his county. They said to contact Adult Protective Services and they will send the police out to do a welfare check. But I already asked the police to do a welfare check and they just left without doing one. I don't understand what to do here.
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I have asked/demanded of him to move into a different apartment and/or some kind of assisted living facility. I have tried to help him generate a list of places, but he still refuses. Even if I did get him into an assisted living facility, I don't understand how to pay for it. I don't have $5k per month lying around, and neither does he. I don't even make $5k per month and I don't have siblings. How do people do this??? He cannot move in with me, he is unmanageable. And to be honest I think he cannot just move into another apartment, he will just repeat the same behavior with a new set of people.
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I have been out to visit him with a list of things to accomplish (like making him sign up for social security). But he is so paranoid that every little task gets stretched out into what feels like a multi-day hostage negotiation. He is still not signed up for social security. Right now I don't see the point of visiting again, because nothing will get done and the whole visit is unpleasant for both of us.
Anyway, if you've read this far, thank you. Every time I think about it I am just paralyzed with fear. It is affecting my performance at work (as an aside, I have no idea how to take off enough time from work to make any of this happen without killing my career, which will leave me jobless after my current contract runs out). All the realistic options I can think of (he becomes homeless, he moves in with me and takes over my life, or he moves into an assisted living facility and I become homeless to pay for it) make me feel like I need to escape. The landlord wants to talk to me again and I don't know what to tell him.
Submitted June 09, 2018 at 11:24PM by RealPlankton https://ift.tt/2sJgce3
