Can someone with dementia be Baker Acted?

Hello everyone, its Mark. And welcome back. In this video I want to talk to you about dementia and the Baker Act. So we had a case very recently where an elderly gentleman had gone to the hospital. His family is indicated that he had dementia.

He’d had it for quite a while and apparently after being interviewed by a triage nurse, they decided to Baker Act him. And so the family called me. They were distraught, very upset because after he was detained at the hospital, he was then transferred to a Baker Act facility. So here you have an elderly man who’s got dementia. He’s afraid, he’s scared and he doesn’t know where he is, he doesn’t know why he’s there.

And the family is understandably very upset. And they said to me, how can somebody who has dementia be Baker Acted? And I said to them, it’s very simple. It only takes two things to get you Baker Acted. The first is a finger.

A finger can get you Baker Acted coupled with somebody to point it. That’s all it takes. So all it took was a doctor in the emergency room to Baker Act this poor old man who has dementia. And guess what? He was stuck in a facility.

Now ultimately we were able to get him out. He clearly didn’t meet criteria. He wasn’t threatening to harm himself, he wasn’t threatening to harm anybody else. But as I’ve spoken about in many of the other videos that you’ll find on our website, the Baker Act unfortunately, is prone to abuse, not by every Baker Act facility, not by every hospital, but by some of them. And yes, it’s possible that if your loved one ends up in an emergency room and they have dementia, they can get Baker Acted.

Now obviously, if they get transferred to a good facility or they’re at a good hospital and they realize that obviously that this is a case of dementia and not somebody who’s suicidal or threatening to hurt anybody and they let them go, then you probably don’t need our help. But if they are detained at a bankrupt facility or a hospital and the hospital is not willing to let them go, then yes, we need to take immediate action and the sooner the better. And as I’ve said in other videos, the one who gets to the courthouse first typically means that they’re going to be the winner because not only can we go to the courthouse, but the facility, which is an agent of the state, they can also go to the courthouse and they can also get a court order. So before that happens, I want to get there and make sure that your loved one is released. So yes, if your loved one has dementia, they can definitely be Baker Acted.

So with that said, they’re thanks for tuning in. See you in the next video. Bye.