Frances Shani Parker, eldercare consultant and Detroit, Michigan author of Becoming Dead Right: A Hospice Volunteer in Urban Nursing Homes, writes this blog. Topics include eldercare, hospice, nursing homes, caregiving, dementia, death, bereavement, and older adults in general. News, practices, research, poems, stories, interviews, and videos are used often. In the top right column, you can search for various topics of interest to you. You can also subscribe to this blog or follow it by email.
Personality can be defined as the combination of qualities that form our distinctive character. It includes our presence, charisma, persona that define our nature and makeup. Like everyone else, people living with Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, have personalities. I have experienced many of their positive and negative personality traits in my role as a hospice volunteer in urban nursing homes and through living life in general.
1) Individuals who score higher on conscientiousness (more responsible and self-disciplined) and lower on neuroticism (less anxious and vulnerable to stress) have a reduced risk of developing dementia.
2) With the onset and progression of dementia, there are large changes in personality that are reported consistently by caregivers in retrospective studies and are consistent with the clinical criteria for the diagnosis of dementia.
These implications of personality research are important for identifying those people who are at greater risk of Alzheimer’s disease and the potential of personality-tailored interventions aimed at the prevention and treatment of the disease.
The following video explains how symptoms of dementia get progressively worse and affect a person’s ability to do everyday tasks. The inability to complete tasks can lead to frustration and affect their moods and behaviors. Certain personality traits can also become more prominent. For example, if people with dementia were always viewed as nice, they may become nicer as the disease progresses. On the other hand, if they were always suspicious, they may become paranoid. Wandering is another issue that is also briefly explained in the video.
Have you ever seen an uplifting movie or heard a passionate song that stirs up rousing emotions when you experience them years later? Those remaining feelings are wonderful scars that continue to heal us as we age. Maybe you can’t remember the names of the movie, the song, the actors, or the singers. But the feelings they generated in a sacred place inside you still resonate.
I thought about this powerful retention of feelings when I read Alzheimer’s research about emotions that people with the disease have long after memories that caused them have disappeared. A sample of 17 participants with probable Alzheimer’s disease and 17 healthy comparison participants underwent separate emotion inducing procedures in which they watched film clips. The clips were intended to induce feelings of sadness or happiness. An evaluation of the emotions later revealed that participants with Alzheimer’s had severely impaired memories of both the sad and happy films. But they continued to report high levels of persisting sadness and happiness beyond their memory of the actual films. The sadness associated with the films lasted more than 30 minutes. This research reminds us that the emotional lives of individuals with Alzheimer's dementia can be greatly influenced by experiences, people, and places they may not recall later.
Caregivers and others must be sensitive to making pleasant emotional memories when managing, interpreting, and responding to behaviors of those with dementia. Loved ones who avoid visiting them because “She doesn’t know who I am” or “I can’t deal with his confusion” must be mindful that the purpose of their presence has nothing to do with anyone's ability to remember anything or anybody, including them. People with dementia should not be greeted with a memory test (What’s my name?) they will probably fail. Names and relationships can easily be told to them.
Interactions with people who have dementia can refine our mastery of thinking outside the box by taking us to an Oz we can learn to respect. We should focus on spending quality time generating emotions that help them feel better and experience love even after our time with them has ended, and we have gone. And there is something in this quality time for us. We can leave with satisfying personal memories of pleasant emotions we inspired and can recall later, too.
