Dementia
Are You Being Followed? How to Overcome Dementia Shadowing
If you’re the primary caregiver for someone with dementia, you may be quite familiar with the challenges experienced in trying to find a quiet moment or two alone – to use the restroom, take a quick shower, or even simply walk into another room. Seniors with dementia can experience heightened anxiety and fear when a loved one is out of sight – a condition known as shadowing. And the behaviors that result can be extremely difficult to manage: anger, crying, or repeatedly asking where you are, to name a few. If you’re struggling with how to overcome dementia shadowing, our dementia care experts have a few tips for you to try.
What Causes Dementia Shadowing?
It helps to understand the reasoning behind shadowing. You are the person’s safe place, the one who helps them to make sense out of … Read More »
The Alarming Link Between Isolation and Alzheimer’s Progression
An attractive mature African American woman asks a question by raising her hand in class.
In the past several years since COVID-19 became a household term, seniors, who are most vulnerable to severe complications from the virus, became more isolated in order to stay safe. And while we already were aware that there are health risks connected with loneliness and isolation, we’re now beginning to realize another serious concern: how isolation and Alzheimer’s progression are linked.
Since people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia may struggle to understand and follow safety precautions, like wearing face coverings, reporting symptoms, and social distancing, isolation for these individuals became especially critical. But while maintaining these seniors’ physical health was the top priority, it’s also important to pay attention to their emotional wellbeing, which can also be negatively impacted without sufficient … Read More »
Dementia Delusions: How to Respond to False Accusations
Dementia delusions can lead to false accusations, and it’s important to know how to respond.
Dementia delusions can come seemingly out of thin air: you place your loved one’s favorite chicken salad sandwich in front of her – light on the mayo, no onions – something she typically enjoys. But today, she pushes the plate away and will not take a bite, insisting that you’ve poisoned the food.
Or, you’ve provided your loved one with a meaningful activity that links her to a significant time in her past career, sorting paperwork. Out of the blue, she accuses you of tampering with the documents in order to steal money from her banking account.
How can you respond to dementia delusions or hallucinations without further agitating the person? Try these strategies:
Keep a controlled, soothing, understanding tone. It might be instinctive … Read More »
How to Effectively Handle the Extreme Emotions of Alzheimer’s
Screaming, crying, and other extreme emotions of Alzheimer’s can unnerve even the most seasoned family caregiver.
Of the many and varied challenging behaviors someone with Alzheimer’s may experience and display, perhaps the most heartbreaking is uncontrollable screaming and/or crying. Seeing a person you love in an inconsolable state of mind, and being completely unsure how to help or to understand what’s causing these extreme emotions of Alzheimer’s, is both painful and frustrating. How can you help a loved one with dementia feel calmer?
To begin with, realize that crying and yelling in dementia can occur as the result of:
Pain
Fear
Boredom
Sadness
Agitation
Frustration
Delusions, delirium, or hallucinations
Sundowning
An uncomfortable environment
Or a number of other factors
For the short-term, try these strategies to help:
Stay calm yourself, speaking to the senior in a soft, soothing tone of voice.
Try to uncover what’s causing the outburst. Maintaining a … Read More »
Help for When You Can’t Live Up to Your Aging Parents’ Expectations
When you can’t live up to your aging parents’ expectations, these tips can help.
In an ideal world, we could manage to perfectly compartmentalize our caregiving duties, staying with a routine that met your aging parents’ expectations, while allowing enough time to take care of our assortment of other responsibilities. But needless to say, life doesn’t follow our desired script, and conflicting needs are frequent when caring for an aging parent. Many older adults resist the need for help, while others may come to depend too heavily on an adult child, leading to unfulfilled expectations and ultimately disappointment for both parties.
Hired Hands Homecare’s aging care professionals provide the following tips to help clarify expectations and communicate successfully:
Focus on empathy. As opposed to pulling away from an older loved one whose expectations seem unrealistic, stop and empathize. Think … Read More »
Make Sure You Have These Legal Documents for Aging Parents in Place
Finalizing all of the necessary legal documents for aging parents can be a challenge, but these tips can help.
If there’s one thing we learned from the COVID pandemic, it’s to be ready for anything. Although it’s human nature to want to procrastinate, particularly as it relates to the unpleasant topic of future planning and putting together all of the necessary legal documents for aging parents, now is the best time to take stock of your loved ones’ final wishes and make sure all of the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed, before the need arises.
Surprisingly, a number of older adults actually do begin the process of completing a will, trust, durable power of attorney, advance healthcare directive, etc., but for a variety of reasons, they never finalize these important documents. Attorney Carolyn Rosenblatt, author of … Read More »
5 Tips for Rummaging Behaviors in Dementia
Try these tips for rummaging behaviors in dementia.
Digging through boxes, cabinets, and closets, taking out assorted items from drawers, and searching repetitively through a number of items may be frustrating for the people providing care for a loved one with Alzheimer’s, but in fact these actions are fulfilling a purpose. Rummaging behaviors in dementia can provide a degree of reassurance, along with the comfort of identifying familiar items and finding purpose and meaning.
The important thing then is not to discourage rummaging, which might lead to agitation, but to more effectively manage this behavior if it becomes disruptive.
How Can You Help Someone with Dementia with Rummaging Behaviors?
These guidelines will help:
Keep rummaging to a controlled area. Assemble bins of items the senior seems especially interested in, such as keys, paperwork, a billfold, tools, gardening equipment, sewing … Read More »
How to Tell if It’s Delirium or Dementia
Learn whether a senior may be experiencing delirium or dementia, and how you can help.
Although dementia takes center stage in diagnoses for older individuals who are struggling with confusion, memory lapses, and disorientation, there’s another condition that is also common, producing similar symptoms, and most importantly, can be cured: delirium. In fact, as many as ¾ of older adults experience delirium after a surgical procedure or infection, and proper diagnosis is crucial to ensure proper treatment. So how can you tell if it’s delirium or dementia impacting someone you love?
One of the biggest differentiators in delirium is that it arises quite suddenly. It also has a tendency to cause symptoms that come and go throughout the day, as opposed to dementia’s slow, steady, ongoing, and rather predictable progression. For example, a person with delirium may struggle … Read More »
Dementia and Incontinence: 7 Tips to Help
If dementia and incontinence are causing challenges for someone you love, these tips can help.
Dementia care necessitates both compassion and creativity to deal with a number of complex behaviors and effects, and that’s particularly true when someone is experiencing both dementia and incontinence. Unfortunately, incontinence occurs frequently in Alzheimer’s as well as other forms of dementia. These tried-and-true approaches from our experts in home care in Marin and the surrounding areas can help decrease the impact of incontinence and prevent an escalation of emotions in someone you love with Alzheimer’s.
Choose your words very carefully. Rather than making reference to incontinence products as “diapers,” for example, call them “briefs” or “pull-up underwear.” Nonetheless, take the cue from your senior loved one; if she or he chooses to utilize the word “diapers” and seems more comfortable with that, then … Read More »
5 Ways to Calm Agitation in Alzheimer’s
Agitation in Alzheimer’s is common but can be eased with these tips.
Agitation in Alzheimer’s is one of the more difficult effects a senior may experience, and it can be incredibly hard for family members to manage. The key is in taking steps to handle agitation before it’s felt and expressed by the senior, which involves keeping track of what has brought about these feelings in the past, and creating a home environment in which those triggers are removed or minimized. These strategies can help:
Designate an area of retreat. When life begins to get stressful, having a specially created area for a senior loved one to go to de-stress can work wonders in restoring calm. This could be a separate room, or merely a comfortable corner with several soothing activities easily available, quiet music, a calming scent to … Read More »
