How To Help Someone With Dementia

How To Help Someone With Dementia

Caregiving for someone who has dementia can be challenging and exhausting. Being responsible for yourself and someone else can lead to many difficult situations that you may have never encountered before. While this may present its fair share of ups and downs, it is not impossible. There are several steps you can take to make caregiving manageable, and in this article we’ll provide tips on how to help someone with dementia.

Accept Support

Many times, when we are going through a difficult time, we feel the need to handle everything on our own. This is not good for ourselves or the people we are caring for. It is important to remember that there are people who can and want to help. We must learn to accept the help. Many times people’s support, whether is be money or time, is the one way they know how to offer aid. When we reject their help, they can feel personally rejected. We must learn to allow people to provide the support that we may need.

Be Compassionate

When times get especially difficult, patience and compassion tend to run low. We need to remind ourselves that the person we are caring for is suffering and can not control their inability to do certain things. Think of yourself when you have been in situations where you needed help. How did you want people to approach you and your situation? This empathy is needed in the entire process of caring for someone with dementia.

Be Realistic

Every situation will not be ideal. When caring for a person with dementia, we need to remind ourselves to be realistic. We need to plan for realistic timelines, set realistic expectations and be realistic about the duties or responsibilities we can or cannot handle. It is important to enjoy the good days and handle the bad days to the best of our ability. Remember that dementia is a disease and it will progress. Being realistic about your course of action will help you better prepare for the challenges that lie ahead.

Consider All Aspects of Dementia

As a caregiver, it can be difficult to place yourself in the shoes of the individual who has dementia. We struggle to understand how difficult tasks can become and it makes figuring out how to help people with dementia even more hard. Many people associate dementia with memory loss, it is not just memory loss. It is the gradual loss of knowing how to function. The process can be very long and drawn out and it’s important to remember how difficult it must be for the individual who is going through these last stages of their life.

Create a Plan

Caregiving for an individual with dementia comes with constant change. It is important to remember how quickly the condition of someone with dementia can change. Caregivers should prepare for a time when they are no longer to care for a loved one on their own. This would include financial considerations and exploring facilities that can help with caring for a loved one. One aspect of this planning is to routinely check the status of the individual they are caring for in an effort to determine when outside help will be needed.

While caring for the eldery, especially those who have dementia, can be exhaustive in many ways. It should be comforting to know that there are some steps caregivers can take when taking on the extra responsibilities. At some point, caregivers will need to seek out other options to help care for their loved ones. Here at Orchard at Brookhaven, we are prepared to help you take that next step. We offer luxurious facilities that provide individuals who have dementia every opportunity to live a happy, fulfilling life. Please contact us for more information or to schedule a tour of our community.