The book by Victor Castanet, The gravediggers revealed what the residents of certain nursing homes are experiencing, and investigations will take place.
franceinfo: We would like to come back with you, Claude Halmos, on the suffering in the face of these situations, families of which one of the members must enter an establishment of this type, or is already there…
Claude Halmos: The entry of a person into an nursing home is for them a moment of psychological fragility, difficult, and painful because it marks the entry into a stage which will be the last of their life, and the renunciation of the essential elements of this life: his home, his independence, his freedom.
But she also weakens her loved ones who have to bear to see her suffer, to mourn themselves for what she was before and to see, above all, the idea of her death getting closer. And all this is often, moreover, aggravated by guilt.
For what reasons ?
Children often feel – at least unconsciously – guilty of not being able to take care of their elderly parents themselves, especially since the cost of establishments makes them fear that they will not be able to offer them what they would like.
They sometimes have the feeling of abandoning them, and this can revive childhood guilt, due for example to parents who could not stand their children having a life apart from them. But, whatever the case, an elderly person being as fragile and dependent as a child, they may be afraid to entrust them to others and even, as with the custody of a child, imagine the worst.
If the reality of the nursing home reassures them, their fantasies subside, but if it validates them, their situation turns into a nightmare.
What is this nightmare all about?
Many families say they have seen their parent abused, daily, in his body, by the lack of care. And, as a result, psychologically abused: being left in one’s excrement is physical suffering, but also a major attack on one’s self-image. To be left on the ground after a fall is to be in danger, but also in psychologically destructive loneliness and abandonment.
If we no longer have any pleasure on a daily basis, not even that of a decent meal. If the roughness of the gestures of the caregivers and the violence of their absence of words add to the pain due to age and illness. If one has the feeling of no longer being for others anything but a thing without interest, without value, which disturbs them and even, possibly, disgusts them, one can no longer want to live.
Some people have watched – and felt utterly helpless – an institution kill their parent’s desire to live in this way. It is a traumatic experience for them, deeply destructive, which has very long-term effects, and which can only increase the fear of their own aging. But also – and we do not say it enough – to install, throughout society, a terrifying vision of old age, which is a major factor of rejection. .