'Traverse Talks' Guest: Judy Cornish

Описание: In this clip from Traverse Talks with Sueann Ramella, you will hear conversation highlights from guest, Judy Cornish, author of Dementia with Dignity and The Dementia Handbook: How to Provide Dementia Care at Home and she is the creator of the DAWN method for dementia care. Judy talks with Sueann about the confusion around a dementia diagnosis and how you can take care of your love one who may be experiencing dementia.

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Full Transcript:

[Sueann] Can you give an overall idea of what dementia is?

[Judy] Yeah, well, dementia's a condition, and here in the United States, we've been confused for a couple of decades, and people do this all the time, even doctors. Somebody goes in for diagnosis and they, you go in and you say, "Here we are, my wife and I, and I'm concerned about my wife's cognition and she seems to be becoming extremely forgetful." And so you have this meeting with your GP and you get a diagnosis. "Well, it looks like Alzheimer's."

[Sueann] Oh!

[Judy] And then, quite often, if I'm the one who's taking the person in for diagnosis, what I say then is, "Well, Dr. Smith, do you mean Alzheimer's or do you mean dementia, one of the other types of dementia?" And the doctor quite often, three times I've had doctors say, "Oh, Alzheimer's, dementia, it's all the same thing."

[Sueann] But it's not. The part that's difficult, I think, is I have been trained to think that elders, or when you're losing your mind, that it's just a lost cause, and you're telling us, "No, that's not the case."

[Judy] That is not the case, not the case at all. And actually, I shouldn't, I should just put in also, of our five types of attention skills, we lose three. Not all of them, just three of them. And that, boy, that's another whole discussion, 'cause he could talk about ADHD and how society views changes, or people who are differently-abled than most of us, regarding attention skills. But that's how people who are experiencing dementia become fixated on something. It's not that they've had a personality change, developed OCD, developed dementia illness. No, it's just that they've lost the ability to redirect their attention. So the metaphor to me, what's really true, when somebody begins to experience dementia, they become less able to take part in a fast-changing, highly technological society that values accomplishment and doing alone.

[Sueann] Oh my gosh, there's so much you just said there. Because that is, I mean post-COVID, I feel like we are trying to address this.

[Judy] Right. COVID came to us and forced us to reevaluate whether or not running the fastest on the treadmill is really of value. Are things really more important than being, than relationships? So here's our problem in America, talk about metaphors. We think life is a trajectory. I begin as that infant in arms, down here in the bottom and, "Oh my goodness, I'm gonna be the first one to the top, and I'm gonna have all the skills, and all the stuff, and all the toys. And all the great life experiences, I'm gonna chalk them all up, and I'm going to possess all this great stuff, and be the best, that will make me happy." Well, that's not what life is. Life is a bell curve. We begin at the beginning with very, very little skills. I think they're latent, but they're not patent yet. And as we go through childhood, we are allowed to learn and grow, in fact, we adults even expect that. And so we allow play because we understand that play, which is not work, play is a really great way to work and grow. Why do we allow that? It's because it's on the uphill, it's on a trajectory, it's increasing skills.