And you can use their reality to keep them calm if they are panicking! We had a husband who was always panicking trying to find his wife. Telling him she had passed away was not an option, but through the family we figured out their routine and could tell him not to worry, that she was at the salon or getting coffee with MaryAnne and would be home soon. It calmed him down, stopped him from trying to climb out of windows looking for her, and kept him in his own reality.
If you are working with dementia patients and they aren't your family, try to get small details from the family that can help!
We had an older gent who was always wanting to get in his car and drive off so we would tell him his car was in the workshop. Eventually someone came up with a car of a make and model he’d owned that was non-working so we parked it up in the garden and he used to get in and sit happily behind the wheel and go for ‘drives’ - he even used to give other residents lifts to wherever they thought they were going.
Trying to orient someone with dementia is cruel in the short term and ultimately pointless. You’ll only upset them by trying to tell them the truth and they’ll have forgotten in an hour and be asking after the same long dead people again. My mother has worked in dementia care for over 25 years and will often tell families “So-and-so is happy in their dementia world”
My Oma cared for her mother for many years, and she told me the best trick she learned was to make a cup of tea. If her mother really wanted to visit someone who was no longer alive, she would say “That’s a lovely idea Mama, but first let’s have some tea.” Usually by the time the tea was ready she would forget all about it.
There's a town in the Netherlands that's essentially a nursing home pretending to be a village, where every resident is either a dementia patient or a caregiver, so that people with dementia can have a high standard of living while still being protected and cared for:
Today, the isolated village of Hogewey lies on the outskirts of Amsterdam in the small town of Wheesp. Dubbed “Dementia Village” by CNN, Hogewey is a cutting-edge elderly-care facility—roughly the size of 10 football fields—where residents are given the chance to live seemingly normal lives. With only 152 inhabitants, it’s run like a more benevolent version of The Truman Show, if The Truman Show were about dementia and Alzheimer’s patients. Like most small villages, it has its own town square, theater, garden, and post office. Unlike typical villages, however, this one has cameras monitoring residents every hour of every day, caretakers posing in street clothes, and only one door in and out of town, all part of a security system designed to keep the community safe. Friends and family are encouraged to visit. Some come every day. Last year, CNN reported that residents at Hogewey require fewer medications, eat better, live longer, and appear more joyful than those in standard elderly-care facilities.
In traditional nursing homes, with their clinical appearance, the situation is openly communicated to residents—you’re sick, you can’t take care of yourself, you’re forgetting things again. But in Hogewey, the residents live in a place that looks and feels like home, even though it’s not; what others know to be a façade, they see as reality, which may help them to feel normal even in the midst of their disease. Psychologist Donald Spence defines the concept of “narrative reality” as the ways in which stories and places help link the “true” world to one that a person is better able to understand, using storytelling as a vehicle to understand the truth—you’re in a place that’s holistically normal, you’re not lost, etc.
The Dutch Village Where Everyone Has Dementia - Josh Planos, The Atlantic
