Driver Dementia

Sometimes it's easy to believe that a kind of amnesia evolving around civility has eluded most drivers on the road. At other times things get so bad that one can almost believe a universal dementia has overtaken drivers. Speeding, disobeying rules of the road, failing to stop at red lights and pedestrian crossings, cutting off traffic, ignoring the need for courtesy to be extended toward other drivers and pedestrians.

We're all in a great big hurry and time is speeding away from us, just as we speed up trying to catch up with that elusive elemental construction; enemy of the best laid plans of getting it all done in a timely manner. Now our worst suspicions have been validated. There are indeed mentally unstable drivers out there amongst us more responsible ones, able to restrain our baser driving instincts.

But they're not necessarily the young louts we usually blame, who bedevil us by their irresponsible driving habits. They're those to whom the wisdom of old age has come and gone, to be replaced by cerebral feebleness beyond their control. Those whose frontal lobes have been attacked by the dread disease of dementia. The elderly who have always driven, and for whom driving themselves about equates with independence.

And who will not submit to the pleas of their worried families to give up driving. Such a drastic impediment in the familiar arc of their everyday lives would be tantamount to removing a source of comfort; that they are as alert, capable and responsible - and more so - than most on the road. But they're not, and their medical condition will only become more aggravated as time goes by.

Moreover, with the growing demographic of elderly people everywhere, much less in Canada, this presents as a real problem. That elderly woman who lost control of her vehicle, crashing into a bus stop, her tonnes of uncontrolled steel killing another grandmother in the sight of her grandson; another who hit an individual yet was unaware that she dragged the body for miles. They're representative of that group.

We will become increasingly reliant on overworked and disinterested medical professionals to make the proper diagnoses, to follow up on the care of these patients, to assess their growing instability, and to decide when it is time to contact relevant authorities to ensure that these elderly people, incapable of normal functioning, no longer threaten themselves or others, driving vehicles.

Clearly, family members of the elderly must develop a steely determination to insist that their afflicted elders must no longer present a danger to society. It's a hard reality, but a necessary one.