Not generally. Yes, it can happen, but it’s not what I normally see unless there’s a trigger, like music therapy. More commonly, there’s a slow decline over the weeks or months, and a pattern of confusion, memory loss and processing errors through each day.
Doreen is right, I think. I’m intentionally arguing from an assumption that a diagnosis of dementia (probable Alzheimer’s type) is not enough information to allow anyone to declare a person unable to give consent. Because a) it’s true and b) I work with many people with dementia who are perfectly able to give consent to lots of things, and I struggle getting their families to accept that they are still legal adults with rights and c) I think it makes for a more interesting thread, because otherwise all we have is recreational outrage over this news report, and that’s boring.
But isn’t there a pretty big difference between deciding what TV channel to watch or whether you can have cookies? It’s not illegal to let a child decide what TV channel to watch or to eat dessert, but no one would argue that a child can have sex…
Children can have sex with each other. I mean, we don’t encourage it, but it’s not illegal. The reason a child can’t consent to sex with an adult is the power differential and the risk - a really *big *risk - that sex will cause harm, physically and emotionally, to the child.
Likewise, patients shouldn’t be having sex with the staff, dementia or no. There’s a power differential there. But with their spouses or with each other? That’s perfectly legal in most circumstances.
I am not asking how fast the condition progresses but rather, once in full-blown Alzheimer’s mode, how fast a person can go from lucid to la-la-land. I provided an example upthread about my grandma and I saw it happen almost in a snap. She was here then the wasn’t then back again (sorta).
I think people here are playing fast and loose with definitions.
Alzheimer’s is a continuum. At first it is not so bad. Barely noticeable and may be easily mistaken for a brain fart. At the end the person is almost completely lost to us. Their body is still there but so much of who they were is lost. It is a stunningly horrible affliction (at least for those who love the person…I always wondered if ignorance really is bliss and the afflicted have no clue at the end…think Flowers for Algernon kinda thing).
At the beginning the spouse will be at home and intimacy will continue with no fuss and no worries. My contention is when you have to put your spouse in a home for permanent care chances are your spouse is way, way down the rabbit hole to require that level of care.
I have been around Alzheimer’s. Seen it up close. And there is no way anyone here will convince me that at the end the person suffering from it was in any way capable of giving consent. I would argue any court would toss out a contract signed by that person as worthless since they cannot know what they are doing in any meaningful sense.
Can the person still choose dessert? Sure. But it doesn’t go a lot farther than that. I maintain that, at the end, there is no way an Alzheimer’s patient can consent to sex anymore than the law thinks a ten year old can consent to sex.
The trick for the court here is to determine how lucid the patient is. Courts assess mental capacity all the time. Nothing new there. But as I said, given she is in long term care my guess is she is pretty far gone. The court, I am sure, will look at this and decide. (If I miss the decision I hope someone here posts an update.)
Her husband didn’t put her in the nursing home. He felt she was safe at home with him and in home caregivers. Her daughters disagreed and came and took her to a nursing home while he was at work. Why didn’t he fight it harder in the moment to get her home? I don’t know. Why were her daughters treated as next of kin with decision making capacity by the nursing home, instead of her husband? I don’t know.
I have only rarely seen a person have any moments of true lucidity once dementia is so far progressed that they are “lost”. I’m not saying your grandma didn’t do that, but that it’s not common in my experience with many patients with Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s in particular, is frequently assessed in 7 stages. Stages 1-5, most people retain the capacity to consent. Stage 7, the undeniably “lost” stage, most of us would agree that they do not. Stage 6 is where things get fuzzy. If she was holding conversations with her daughter, she was not in Stage 7, which is characterized by severe impairment of speech. She was at most in Stage 6, the fuzzy stage.
So, yes, I agree that it’s important to assess whether someone is “lost” before making a decision about their capacity to consent. I don’t think that was done in this case, as the doctor used a short term memory test to decide she couldn’t consent. Short term memory loss is not an indication of “lost.” Now, she may have been “lost”; some people are “lost” in stage 6. I wasn’t her nurse, so I have no opinion about that. But given the publicly available information at this point in time, I’m not convinced.
Mostly I’m not convinced because my personal and professional experience is that caregivers, including nurses and doctors, are totally squicked out by seniors having sex in their workplace. Occam’s Razor at work - is it more likely that his caregivers were squicked out and tried to prevent gross old person sex in their nursing home, which happens all the time, or that a husband who is by most accounts a loving and caring person, raped his wife? To me, the former is more likely until presented evidence of the later.
For those of you that are so clearly determined that this is wrong, what about other lesser sexual type acts? What if he came in and just kissed her or hugged her? Most jurisdictions would consider non-consensual kissing to be sexual assault.
You do your position no good by mischaracterizing the statement from the news article.
Your use of “quickly” is unsupported.
Your claim that he tried to hide the evidence is making an inference from a different, more neutral, report.
Even your claim that he “jumped her bones” is nothing more than an attempt to portray the activity in the most crass manner.
I do not believe enough information has been presented to make a firm decision. I have no problem with folks coming down on either side of the debate. However, your misrepresentation serves only to obscure the actual discussion.
The police legally bugging the room could bring the charges. After all, in the case being discussed here the supposedly injured party is not bringing the charges.
And you are right - either or both of them could be charged. Which just further points out the absurdity of the situation.
BTW, I am positing that they have a happy sex life. The situation would be different if one of them had been refusing sex with the other and there was no reasonable presumption of consent.
I do not know either nor do I know the rules and procedures governing such things. I will only submit that the husband wanting to keep her at home is no indication, one way or another, of the severity of her malady. People get weird about this stuff. I would submit that the kids wanting to get mom out of the house and into long-term care is also revealing. They saw a need that step-dad, for whatever reason, wasn’t seeing. That does not make the kids “right” but it makes me wonder…
Honestly my sense was she was never really lucid but just playing it off. E.G.
“I am not dating your daughter. I am her son. Your grandson!”
“Ohh! Yah…silly me. <<pause>> So when did you meet my daughter?”
Was she lucid in that moment? I am guessing no but I can’t really know.
I get the squicked out part and that alone should not stop a couple from being intimate.
But consider who has to clean up afterwards. They might have something to say about that.
Or, they forcibly and unnecessarily curtailed their mother’s liberty out of animosity toward their stepfather. Their actions were an imposition upon their mother just as his were and should be just as much subject to question.
Kids can be little shits too. The stepdad (not original dad) angle has me on the kids’ side for now. Not to mention him wanting to bone his wife in a nursing home.
Is there any indication that Mrs. Rayhons was actually hurt by the experience? I’m not talking about nominal legal harm by technically being the victim of something that the law deems an offence, but asking whether the last days of her life were significantly more painful due to direct or indirect effects of rape trauma. For example, was she having flashbacks? Did she develop rape PTSD? Did she end up pregnant with an unwanted child?
I don’t think they’re necessarily identical to a child, but if the argument is that they’re not of sound mind, saying that they should have sex just because they want to doesn’t seem like a good argument.
On the other hand if they for many many decades always had an active consensual sex live should she be automatically denied being able to continue such because she now has a neurological disease?
There does seem to be a difference (ethically if not legally) between capacity to consent to a new partner and her capacity to continue to engage in the same relationship she has for multiple decades.
What better reason on earth is there for anyone to have sex than because they want to, with a partner who wants to? To prevent what both partners want feels punitive, when they’ve already been through so much shit that comes with degenerative disease.