Alzheimer's patient caretakers and mental health professionals?!
Question: I'm a writer, and I'm writing a story involving an Alzheimer's patient. I just had a few questions.
What do you tell the patient when they wake up if they have no idea what is going on, or if they think it is a different time or place? Do you just play along, or do you tell them the truth about what has happened to them?
In the advanced stages of Alzheimer's disease, what is it like for the patient? Are they lucid one moment and drawing a complete blank the next? Or is it a gradual transition?
And finally, when the patient has delusions where they insist they just spoke with someone who has passed away, is that just a memory surfacing or do they hallucinate fresh conversations with people who have passed on?
Any help you could give would be very much appreciated. Thanks!
Answers: I'm a writer, and I'm writing a story involving an Alzheimer's patient. I just had a few questions.
What do you tell the patient when they wake up if they have no idea what is going on, or if they think it is a different time or place? Do you just play along, or do you tell them the truth about what has happened to them?
In the advanced stages of Alzheimer's disease, what is it like for the patient? Are they lucid one moment and drawing a complete blank the next? Or is it a gradual transition?
And finally, when the patient has delusions where they insist they just spoke with someone who has passed away, is that just a memory surfacing or do they hallucinate fresh conversations with people who have passed on?
Any help you could give would be very much appreciated. Thanks!
It is common practice to re-orient dementia patients when they are disoriented or confused. There comes a time however, when they simply cannot respond to orientation to date, place and reality. Their poor fogged brains simply have no capacity for retaining short term memory, and they live in the past...should they live long enough, that too eventually goes and they are simply walking shells, no longer capable of thought.