The number of elderly dementia sufferers in Korea rose from 720,000 in 2017 to 910,000 this year, and many go missing when the illness takes hold of their minds and they have nobody to care for them.
According to the National Police Agency, 12,479 dementia patients were reported missing in 2019, up from 7,650 in 2012. The rise slowed during the coronavirus pandemic, but already this year 8,444 people were reported missing, and 97 percent of them were over 60.
A 56-year-old resident of Gimcheon, North Gyeongsang Province has been caring for his 88-year-old mother since she was diagnosed with dementia 12 years ago. "Our family cannot care for her around the clock, but I'm worried she might walk out of our house and get lost," he said.
The only thing that can be done at present to find a missing dementia patient is to call the police, who then launch a search based on physical descriptions. Emergency text messages are sent out to people in the region.
But alerts cannot be sent out for every missing person because there are too many. In fact, nearer 30,000 people were reported missing this year, including children and handicapped people, but police sent out emergency text messages in only 1,000 of the cases.
Prof. Lee Yoon-ho at Dongguk University said, "Sending out too many emergency text messages could increase public stress and complaints, so emergency messages are only sent out when absolutely necessary."
Many families make their elderly relatives wear GPS bracelets, while others install dementia door locks which require key cards to open and close.
Park Chae-ah (38) lives in Dongjak, Seoul, with her 77-year-old father who suffers from dementia. He left home one day last year and was found wandering the streets three hours later. Park bought her father a GPS bracelet, but he took it off saying it was uncomfortable, so now she has a dementia door lock instead.
Experts say the government should be more active in registering the personal information of dementia patients. According to the NPA, only around 210,000 or 23 percent of all dementia patients had registered their fingerprints on a government database as of July this year.
