Thoughtful Dementia Care Quotes

“family member with dementia was pleased and satisfied”
― Jennifer Ghent-Fuller, Thoughtful Dementia Care: Understanding the Dementia Experience

“Four things about learning how to care for someone with dementia are important to realize. Firstly, most family carers are unfamiliar with the effects of dementia on people’s abilities, and people with dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease, or another disease, function in ways that most of us have never experienced.  Common sense does not help here. The carers have to learn how to understand new information about memory processes and how to cope with situations that are new to them. Secondly, don’t be too hard on yourself. If you realize you have made a mistake in the way you have been interacting with a person with dementia, learn from it, change what you are doing, but don’t hang onto the guilt. Forgive yourself. Know that every family goes through these painful experiences and feelings of being inadequate. Apologize to the person with dementia and then distract them with something fun. Thirdly, understand that each person with dementia is unique in the way they behave and how they understand what is happening. What has helped one family carer to cope may not help the next. Be patient with yourself and the person with dementia and never stop trying to find ways to help yourselves. Coping often means trying one thing after the other, and then using the approach that works for as long as it continues to work. Fourthly, scolding and arguing will not help them learn because they have lost most of their capacity to learn with their short-term memory. Scolding will, however, establish a procedural memory in their mind that interacting with you is always unpleasant.”
― Jennifer Ghent-Fuller, Thoughtful Dementia Care: Understanding the Dementia Experience

“People with dementia cannot remember that they have asked a question repeatedly, but they are quite capable of understanding that they are being criticized and scorned and are able to have feelings of sadness, humiliation and despair as a result. This is a very difficult disease to have, and it is important for the rest of us not to make the experience worse than it already is.”
― Jennifer Ghent-Fuller, Thoughtful Dementia Care: Understanding the Dementia Experience

“Short-term memory is  the memory process that allows you to do many things at once, or  ‘multitask.’ For example, when you are cooking breakfast, you can remember how long the eggs have been boiling, when the frying bacon needs to be turned, when in the process to turn on the coffee maker and start the toast, and when you can fit in peeling the oranges. In contrast, a person with short-term memory deficit can concentrate on only one thing at a time, and if a second thing distracts them, the first may leave their consciousness completely. Trying to concentrate on many things at once, as we do if we are multitasking, becomes difficult, and then impossible, for people with short-term memory loss. Think about the process of making breakfast described above. The cook has to remember to check on each item of food being prepared. They also have to recall all the steps required to cook each item from start to finish. Not only that, but they also need to use their short-term memory to remember which of those steps they’ve already done and what comes next. People with short-term memory loss due to dementia usually stop doing complex tasks like cooking very early in the disease process. These complex tasks are very common in the work world. If a person is still working when they start to develop dementia, they often lose their job because they can no longer function the way they need to in order to complete their work. Speaking from my own experience as a nurse on a hospital ward, I had to remember the names, diagnoses, room and bed number, and general health conditions of a dozen or more people; also, what medications they got and when, what care and treatments they needed to receive and how well those went, whether or not I’d recorded all this information, what I needed to ask physicians when they arrived on the ward; and, still be cooperative with the many interruptions that happened every hour. Most jobs have similar complexities. They require a reliable short-term memory.”
― Jennifer Ghent-Fuller, Thoughtful Dementia Care: Understanding the Dementia Experience

“perseverating.”
― Jennifer Ghent-Fuller, Thoughtful Dementia Care: Understanding the Dementia Experience