Recently, the murder of a nursing home resident in Minnesota made headlines when a peer, a locally famous wrestler in his younger days, became agitated and assaulted the resident, breaking his hip — an injury which led to the victim’s death. The aggressor, a patient with longstanding Alzheimer dementia, was not charged with a crime because of his diagnosis. While this episode highlights the issues patients with dementia may pose to other nursing home residents with respect to the potentially violent behavior that characterizes the condition, it does not address the other etiology of such behavior in long term care settings.

With increasingly tight budgets and even tighter staffing standards, many group homes and traditional boarding facilities for the functionally mentally ill in this country are forced to cease operations, transferring patients to nontraditional settings such as nursing homes. Adult mentally ill patients in society needing skilled nursing in settings other than nursing homes are being forced into those new environments and facing similarly violent fates; as a consequence, criminal charges usually follow. Staff and elderly patients are increasingly the vulnerable ones. | LINK

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