Unattended wandering that goes out of bounds, a behavior known as elopement, is a special concern for caregivers and search and rescue responders. Wandering (especially if combined with sundowning) can result in the person's being lost out of doors at night, dressed inappropriately, and unable to take many ordinarily routine steps to ensure his or her personal safety and security. This is a situation of great urgency, and the necessity of searching at night imposes added risks on the searchers.
In some countries the social costs of elopement, already significant, are increasing rapidly. A search and rescue mission lasting more than a few hours is likely to expend many hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of skilled worker hours and, per mission, those involving subjects with dementia typically expend significantly more resources than others.
Read more about this topic: Wandering (dementia)
Famous quotes containing the word elopement:
“Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“Rather would I have the love songs of romantic ages, rather Don Juan and Madame Venus, rather an elopement by ladder and rope on a moonlight night, followed by the father’s curse, mother’s moans, and the moral comments of neighbors, than correctness and propriety measured by yardsticks.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“pulling off the fat diamond engagement ring,
pulling off the elopement wedding ring,
and holding them, clicking them
in thumb and forefinger,
the indent of twenty-five years,
like a tiny rip leaving its mark....”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)