By Staff
December 28th, 2024
BURLINGTON, ON
Communicating With A Person Living With Dementia
Wednesday, January 15, Time: 6 – 8 p.m.
To be broadcast via Zoom.
We will provide the Zoom link days before the event
Recognizing the signs of dementia.
It’s important to make an effort to engage people living with dementia to reduce their isolation and help them feel included. Yet it can be uncomfortable and intimidating if you don’t know what to say or how to respond – especially if they say things that we consider inappropriate or that don’t make sense to us.
Our Communicating with a Person Living with Dementia workshop will give you tips, tricks and strategies you can use to connect effectively with people living with dementia at all stages of the disease.
This is a topic which is close to my heart. My mom before she passed away suffered from dementia. It caused a bit of a family rift because my eldest brother who took on responsibility for looking after her didn’t allow us to participate. He would not accept our input either.
Before she passed away I bumped into a doctor. Whilst I was in a bookstore. I was looking at books about dementia. He told me that that was your specialty. And he said communication and understanding what the patient is suffering from is all important.
He told me a few things that certainly helped.
He said first off imagine a bookcase with 10 shelves, totally full of books. Imagine the earth starts to shake, which causes the bookshelf to shake. As the bookshelf shakes, the biggest movement is seen at the top shelf.. The books fall off and as the shakes continue the books on the 9th shelf, then the eight shelf, then the seventh shelf etc start to fall off. He said that is what it’s like for a dementia patient. The top shelf is their most recent memories. The ninth shelf the not so recent etc etc. So now you can understand what is happening to their memories. They’re losing their nearest memories first and then it gets to older memories.
Before my mom passed she was imagining that she was living 40+ years ago.
The second thing he said was when you are listening to and then talking to a dementia patient. You must remember that logic has basically gone out of the window because they are living in previous times.
So when my mom would tell my brother that she wanted to move back to the small village to be with friends where she lived 40 years or so ago, he would try to tell her that it’s all changed and people that she knew have all left there. The doctor said don’t try to reason. Just agree with them. They will be happy but they will forget the discussion shortly. Do not try to reason with them he said.
Another thing he said was that dementia patients will retain a happy experience that they have just encountered for a short period of time. However, they retain a bad experience for about twice the length of time as they do for a good experience. So it’s very important to give them happy experiences, even if that means agreeing with them when they’re being illogical.
He said unfortunately family members of a patient with dementia tend to talk down to the patient. My brother did this not out of nastiness or spite but just because people tend to treat dementia patients as if they are young children.. for example when she would finish her meal he would say in a condescending tone “well done mother!”. The doctor said do not treat the patient like a child. They still can understand and have emotions depending upon how they are spoken to.
My mom experienced the loss of decorum. She was brought up a proper young lady knowing how to behave in public. What to say and what not to say but as the dementia took its grip on her, she would start saying inappropriate things in public and also in dealing with those who tried to take care of her. The doctor said there’s little point in trying to correct that because it’s going to have no effect whatsoever. He said just try to get the patient to focus on something else.
I hope what I’ve said here helps others. It’s a particularly horrible disease.