Heroes Not Zombies

Here’s an interesting article about patients with dementia.

It focuses on interaction. This particular piece gives examples from America where Catholic and other Christian care homes introduced regular services of prayers and hymns, and showed how these old traditions connected with the patients when other forms of care didn’t. I don’t think this means that Catholic or other religious people have, or can have, a better experience of dementia than others, but I do think it highlights yet again the need for carers to be non-judgemental. Where a person has strong religious beliefs, engaging with them through their lens of understanding can really bring about surprising changes.

But what I especially like about this article is how it highlights three things – the need for compassion, the need to remember that all human beings are individuals, and the need to enter into active engaged relationships.

Like anything else in medicine, helping someone suffering from dementia requires understanding, compassion, and dedication. Care needs to be tailored to each patient’s personality, life history, and stage in the development of the disease. When this is done well, new possibilities open up. What might have been an atmosphere of regret and hopelessness centered on the disease’s relentless progress can be transformed into an upbeat outlook that celebrates abilities, rejoices in moments of recognition, and looks to the future with hope.

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We simply do not know what is transpiring in the mind of another person. It is all too easy to place all the blame on the dementia patient, lamenting and even despising their disability. But were we to do so, we would be letting ourselves off the hook a bit too soon. Awareness, understanding, and affection are not merely the outputs of some inner dynamo. They also emerge in response to what others do, say, and feel. In some cases, unresponsiveness may say less about a patient’s disability than a failure on our part to offer something worth responding to.