📋 What Caregivers Can Do When You Suspect Overmedication (AARP Article)

[Winter2025VA]

FROM THE ARTICLE.

What to Do When You Suspect Overmedication.

Protect your loved one if you are worried they are taking too many drugs.

By Paul Wynn, AARP. Published July 17, 2025.

When filmmaker Susie Singer Carter placed her mom in one of Los Angeles’ top-rated assisted living facilities, she believed she was doing everything right. Her mother had Alzheimer’s disease but remained physically strong and socially engaged. But within a few months, her mom, who once held court at the facility every Friday singing songs with a piano player, became unrecognizable: silent, immobile and incontinent. “I thought it was the disease progressing,” Carter recalls. “But it wasn’t. It was actually the drugs.”

That revelation launched Carter on a quest to uncover the hidden epidemic of overmedication that is quietly robbing individuals of alertness, independence and vitality. Her mom had been given the sedating medication Depakote without her knowledge or consent. She found out only when she received a call from her mother’s primary care doctor. They stopped the drug immediately, but the damage persisted. “Once we got her off it, some of her spark came back, but she never walked again. It was like, ‘Oh, hello again, there you are, I was wondering where you went'."

USE LINK BELOW TO READ THE ARTICLE.

https://www.aarp.org/caregiving/medical/caregiving-over-medication/