When a person with dementia gets something fundamental wrong — the year it is, your relationship to them — it can be difficult to know what to do. Do you correct them and risk upsetting them? Is it a lie or unethical to go along with it?
Ted Johnson, who chairs the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the Emory School of Medicine, says that playing along is not only OK; it’s often the best thing for both the patient and the caretaker. In the past three years, Johnson and his colleagues have trained 1,500 care partners on how to use basic improv skills.
In improv, Johnson told me on this episode of the “First Opinion Podcast,” “people are giving up control and dropping their agendas. It’s a ‘yes, and.’ It’s ‘make your partner look great.’” All of those things can improve an interaction with someone with dementia. For about 20 years, people have been using improv skills to work with Alzheimer’s patients and others. Now, Johnson and his colleagues want to figure out exactly what types of training have the most benefit.
“A lot of the evidence-based data that we’re seeking is actually, ‘how does this work for the person who is caring for the person living with dementia?’ … If you do this well, the person living with dementia will be less agitated, less likely to have outbursts, less likely to be disengaged. So all of those things are good. But I think that in dementia care, anything that works for the care partner is a huge victory for the person living with dementia because so much depends on how that partner’s doing.”
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