How to Cope with Dementia

Coping with dementia can be very hard. Many people don't know how to react best on difficult situations with their loved one who has dementia. This misunderstanding often leads to stress and health problems in caregivers. Scientific research has proven that caregivers have a 7 years less life expectancy. Caregiver burden is a real problem and underestimated.

Caregivers have often problems to subscribe the problem behaviour to the disease instead of to the person itself. It is easy to see when someone has cancer and is dying, but in some way it is very hard to see the same thing in persons with dementia. Behaviour is often related to the personality of the person it is hard to make a distinction between normal behaviour and unhealthy behaviour cause by a disease like Dementia.

The best way in trying to understand someone's behaviour is by placing yourself in to his mind. People with Dementia are disoriented in time and place and sometimes in person. This means that they don't know how late it is, if it is day or night, if they need to eat in an hour or in 4. They often don't know where they are, sometimes they can get lost in their own house by not finding the bathroom. When the process goes on people often forget names of their loved ones, and after that their faces. They don't recognise their wife or children and even forgot they had a wife.

Another problem is their language usage and understanding. They make mistakes when they talk to people. They may use strange words that don't exist or they can't remember how the TV is called. When the process goes on, people don't understand the words you are saying to them. You told them twice or 3 times that you should eat with your fork but they just can't understand what a fork is, maybe they even get angry at you for yelling to him. Eventually persons with dementia often go mute in the end. Not able to talk and understanding words but still able to feel and think.

Caregivers often don't understand why he is not talking to the neighbours any more. And when you talk to him he is never listening. This is because they have a short span of concentration. They have difficulties in pointing their concentration to one point. All this is accompanied by primary memory problems. And the problem is they are accusing you of the problem.

Alex Mayor is a psychologist and works in both research and a nursery home. He works mostly with people who have Alzheimer or another form of Dementia. He gives support in coping with dementia to caregivers and to the nurses who work with demented people.

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