Dementia and Your Caring Role

This page discusses the importance of taking a break from caring, how to organise it and who can help. Caring for someone with dementia can be physically and emotionally tiring and stressful. Families and carers can easily become isolated from social contacts, particularly if they are unable to leave the person they are caring for. Regular breaks mean that you can have a rest, go out, attend to business or go on a holiday.

For people living with dementia, their families and carers. The Dementia Guide is an important resource for any person impacted by any form of dementia, of any age. The Guide contains information about the impact dementia may have on a person, the treatment, support and services they may need.
The 4th edition of this guide is now available to read online, download a pdf, listen to an audio version or request a print copy.

The book is for caregivers, family members, friends, neighbours as well as educators and professionals—anyone touched by dementia. Dr. Boss helps caregivers find hope in "ambiguous loss"—having a loved one both here while possibly grieving a former version of the relationship. • Outlines seven guidelines to stay resilient while caring for someone who has dementia • Discusses the meaning of relationships with individuals who have a diagnosis of dementia • Offers approaches to understand and cope with the emotional strain of care-giving.The author shows a way to embrace rather than resist the ambiguity in your relationship with someone who has dementia.

In this book, you'll learn how to approach caring with calm, centered presence; respond to your loved one with compassion; and maintain authentic communication, even in the absence of words. Most importantly, you'll discover ways to manage the grief, anger, depression, and other emotions often associated with dementia care, so you can find strength and meaning in each moment you spend with your loved one.

This accessible and detailed guide includes practical tips, checklists for best practice, and case studies from a wide range of carers that addresses solutions to common problems and giving expert advice on how to deliver compassionate and dignified care to older people. It is easy to read and provides anecdotal experience from carers and tips from the experts.

Carers are particularly vulnerable to feeling stressed, worried and worn down by the vast demands that often come with caregiving, be they physical, psychological or emotional. Mindfulness can be enormously beneficial to carers, whether professional or voluntary, as a means of developing greater inner stability, resilience and gaining more control over their thoughts, feelings and emotions. The book includes easy-to-use and enjoyable mindfulness exercises, short enough to fit into a busy day, as well as accompanying audio tracks to support and guide the reader through these exercises.

Gretchen Staebler promises to spend one year in her childhood home caring for her stubborn ninety-six-year-old mother—sort of a middle-aged gap year. Then her mother will move to assisted living and she will return to her own life, their relationship magically having become all she ever longed it to be. Can it be that easy?

Dr. Kirkpatrick tackles the tough questions about caretaking, grief, loss, love, and sex for those whose partners have dementia. When is the right time to find or even to begin considering a care home for your loved one? How can you navigate the complexities of your changing sexual relationship with an Alzheimer's partner? When is it appropriate for you to consider new relationships?

Another Cup of Tea is a book for anyone caring for someone with dementia or Alzheimer's disease. Selected from the diary of a son caring for his Mum in the latter stages of her struggle with vascular dementia. Written often in the midst of long, challenging days and nights. You'll find yourself either laughing, crying or even nodding along in recognition at the ups and downs of their time together. You'll notice how tea often saved the day, how they coped or didn't and perhaps imagine yourself in their shoes, wondering what could happen next and how you'd cope in similar circumstances.

Clive Beaumont was diagnosed with Younger Onset Dementia at age 45, when his children were aged just 3 and 4. He had become less and less able to do his job properly and had been made redundant from the Army the year before. Clive's wife, Helen, tells of how she and the rest of the family made it through the next six years until Clive died: the challenge of continually adapting to his progressive deterioration; having to address the legal implications of the illness; applying for benefit payments; finding nursing homes; and juggling her responsibilities as a wife, a mother and an employee. She also describes the successful founding and development of The Clive Project, a registered charity set up by Helen and others in a bid to establish support services for people with Younger Onset Dementia. Younger Onset Dementia is comparatively rare, but not that rare. This story is for the family and friends of people with the condition, for the people themselves, and for the professionals working with them.

In the spring of 1986, Sue Miller found herself more and more deeply involved in caring for her father as he slipped into the grasp of Alzheimer's disease. The Story of My Father is a profound, deeply moving account of her father's final days and her own response to it. With care, restraint and consummate skill, Miller writes of her struggles to be fully with her father in his illness while confronting her own terror of abandonment, and eventually the long, hard work of grieving for him. And through this candid, painful record, she offers a rigorous, compassionate inventory of two lives, a powerful meditation on the variable nature of memory and the difficulty of weaving a truthful narrative from the threads of a dissolving life. This is a truly remarkable book from one of America's best loved authors.

Dasha Kiper was twenty-five when she first became the live-in carer for a Holocaust survivor with Alzheimer's disease. She soon discovered the emotional strain and challenges of caring for a person whose condition disrupts the rules of time, order and continuity. In Travellers to Unimaginable Lands, Kiper explores the complex and profound psychology of caregiving, illuminating how the healthy brain's biases and intuitions make caring for people with dementia disorders so profoundly and inherently difficult. Blending neuroscience, psychology, philosophy and literature with beautifully-observed case studies, Kiper illuminates the underlying mental mechanisms behind carers' experiences, dispels the myth of the perfect caregiver and, in the process, opens the door to understanding and forgiveness.

Based on her hugely popular Facebook posts and Instagram photos, Feeding My Mother is a frank, funny, inspirational and piercingly honest account of the transformation in Jann Arden's life that has turned her into the primary "parent" to her mom, who is in the grip of Alzheimer's.
Jann Arden moved in to a house just across the way from her parents in rural Alberta to be close to them but also so they could be her refuge from the demands of the music business and a performing career. Funny how time works. Since her dad died in 2015, Jann cooks for her mom five or six times a week. Her mom finds comfort in her daughter's kitchen, not just in the delicious food but also just sitting with her as she cooks. And Jann finds some peace in caring for her mom, even as her mom slowly becomes a stranger. "If you told me two years ago that I'd be here," Jann writes, "I wouldn't have believed it. And yet we still fall into so much laughter, feel so much insane gladness and joy. It's such a contrast from one minute to the next and it teaches me constantly: it makes me stronger and more humble and more empathetic and caring and kind."
The many people who are dealing with a loved one who is losing it will find inspiration and strength in Jann's wholehearted, loving response and her totally Jann take on the upside-down world of a daughter mothering her mother. Feeding My Mother is one heck of an affirmation that life just keeps on keeping on, and a wonderful example of how you have to roll with it.