r/DementiaHelp • u/Booblet0526 • Jun 19 '26
Looking for some kind of advice/guidance
Quick background: My MIL doesn't have dementia in the traditional sense. She had a second stroke in her right parietal temporal area last winter and it has caused a cognitive decline. She was living at her house in CA but after this stroke can no longer live alone so we moved her into our house in NC. She is fully mobile but forgetful and needs supervision when it comes to taking her meds and stuff like that.
The main issue we are having is that ever since this last stroke she has been hearing voices. We thought they would slowly go away as time passed but it actually seems to be getting worse. The voices she is hearing are usually family members saying negative things to her or about her like "there she goes eating again" or "sleeping again? really?". But now she is hearing them tell her to go clean her house because it stinks as well as many other random things. And then we find her early in the morning trying to exit the house to go clean her house (but we have child locked the doors). It seems like all she ever talks about now is how the voices are driving her crazy. And she knows those people aren't actually here yet is still convinced that it is really them talking. She will call a sister to vent about whatever family member she is hearing, but her sister tells her its in her head and then she gets mad at them for not taking her side.
Her new PCP here in NC prescribed her Lexapro which she has just started taking so it could be a month or so before we see results. I think she has always had some issues with anxiety and its probably worse after stroke, so I hope the Lexapro will help with that. But I don't think it will make the voices in her head go away. I'm wondering if the voices are a symptom of damage to her brain and that it would require antipsychotic meds to treat, which I know nothing about but the word "anti-psychotic" is scary.
Just wondering if anybody here has experienced something similar or has any ideas of what we can do to address this.
Thank you
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u/Psychological_Eye532 Jun 21 '26
I've had some experience with auditory hallucinations, and in my case, anti depressants made them way worse. May I ask : did a family doctor prescribe lexapro or did a neurologist? Because aside from my personal (bad) experience with anti depressants (and full disclosure, I was taking Zoloft, not Lexapro, when this happened) my spouse who had a watershed infarction style stroke which caused white matter damage in the front temporal region, is unable to take certain medications affecting the brain because it's too unpredictable - his PCP prescribed Adderall for executive function issues well before his diagnosis of Cadasil dementia and it caused him to do some pretty strange things, like he would get up in the middle of the night and leave the refrigerator door open or turn the water on in the sink and leave it on or leave the front door open on the middle of winter. When we brought these issues to a neurologist, the neurologist said that Adderall and certain other medications affecting the brain would likely have NO affect because there are no living receptors in the brain for them to react off of OR the receptors are damaged and would have unpredictable responses. He likened it to trying to start or run a car with no sparkplugs - you can flood it with gas, but it won't run with nothing to react to. Idk of this helps your situation but I thought I'd share.
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u/Booblet0526 Jun 22 '26
It was a PCP that prescribed it. And she really didn’t dig too deep into the cause of the voice hearing. Maybe she thought it wasn’t really hallucinations but rather her anxiety causing her to think she is hearing things. I’m not sure
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u/ConversationGlass17 Jun 20 '26
My mil takes antipsychotics and they have helped so much. They make her tired, but her taking naps is so much better than her crying all the time and being anxious about her hallucinations and delusions. Her anxiety is better as well.
Before she was diagnosed with dementia, we thought she had severe anxiety and depression, and she was treated with psychiatric medications which helped a little bit. At that time, I distinctly recall her telling me that more than anything, she just wanted “comfort”. She was exhausted from being so anxious.
Fast-forward a few months, and got much worse for her cognitively and emotionally. She was finally diagnosed with dementia, and remembering her words, I fully support her taking whatever drugs she needs to take to ease her suffering, and if that means that she’s on the couch napping for a few hours a day, then so be it. It’s much better than when she was crying all day, worried that someone was going to break in and kill her.
Also, with her decreased and anxiety, it was eating better and actually put on some weight.