I've seen a lot of sentiment that being "put into a home" is a terrible fate for an older person. But from a social worker acquaintance I've heard a recent story about an old eccentric man who lived alone for a long time in an unheated house (because he lacked the faculties to fix his shit) who got a placed into one thanks to this acquaintance, and the old guy is having just the best time with a heated room, warm clean blankets and hot meals served to him. Not to mention a modicum of social interaction that doesn't have anything to do with bills and groceries. Hearing just how much he valued and appreciated the warmth was quite touching.
My mum worked in social care for a long time, with the old and physically and mentally disabled mostly.
She had to leave, because although she loved her job, the pay was never great, and the management began to get weird and woke.
My mum would do stuff like take groups of them to the pub, or the park or zoo, and even to our house; I met many of them, played videogames with 'em and stuff.
Management some times frowned on these activities.
That and the managers started going weird and hiring all foreigners, and the foreigners would treat the old people and the tards terribly
It broke her heart.
They would bring in weird ideologically warped people from outside to manage, and it'd all go fucked.
With the old people in the 80's it was lefties who fucked it; Clifford, the manager, black chap, started locking the old people in their rooms at six pm and throwing blues parties, and feeding old Indian men Beef "he won't know" - fuckin' nigger.
My mother told him he was being a racist himself, and he took her to tribunal; the union man said he could do nothing, but she won on her own, because she was right.
In the 90's she started working with the severely mentally and physically disabled, and the deaf and blind.
Real dunglflungers.
You have to have a sick sense of humour to work with people who have severe mental retardation, sensory loss and often stark and horrible deformities.
Cecil was a gibbon-armed black fella, blind and deaf, his parents were from Barbados, but they flew here, and abandoned him.
He would fling his shit innacurately, as he had no eyes; the sockets were totally empty.
He couldn't speak, of course, he would gambol around a set route in a room, and he could make his own breakfast if the things were exactly where he remembered them.
His parents had kept him locked in a room, and just pushed a plate of sandwiches through the door twice a day.
She got out of there for all sorts of reasons; the managers were less woke, but were more corrupt, and they would do stuff like ignore when the people being sent to t hem had obvious signs of being sexually abused; this Pakistani girl my mother met haunted her.
She was mentally retarded, couldn't speak. and her brothers had been raping her constantly.
The managers knew - they had a state contract to look after people, and they were in addition responsible as human beings.
They did nothing.
They sent her back to her family.
As she would put it; "There is no care in Care".
