re: #201 Decatur Deb

So I get my ‘reduced capacity’ card in 16 months?

This is actually an issue I’ve been thinking about a lot. Dementia can be very hard to treat, but it can be manageable and I’ve read stuff that says that involving the person from the beginning is the best possible road to take, that early detection gives the person a greater ability to deal with the emotional challenges. So I’m kind of strongly for testing older people at any point we can, but there’s already a gross dismissal of older people in US society that’s really dumb, and i don’t want to reinforce ‘old people are all senile’.

Again, a cultural problem; we need to value strong connections with older people more; a large part of the reason why we don’t is the disparity in wealth and simple inability to keep those connections strong. When you have to move around for work, and when the amount of money the elderly have to survive on is so low, you segregate geographically by age.