Hello. a thoughtful and sincere attempt to explain how and why people with dementia are viewed by those who are not living with the symptoms of dementia. I have come to believe that dementia is not just/all/mostly about forgetting. It is about organizing, drawing conclusions, selectively focusing on specific parts of a recreated moment. It is more about processing than it is about issues of recall/remembering. It is about the changes in how we figure out what is going on around us. It is about our sense of being. Our minds, those of us living with the symptoms of dementia, continue to attempt to meet the same needs as do others minds. Unfortunately our switches, neural networks, processor/hippocampus does not process/integrate/interpret input as it did in the past. It is more inconsistent, selective in ways which are not now understood nor appreciated by us or by others. Our need for clarity, security, self image are not met as they were prior to the interference caused by dementia. This lack of sureness/continuity in though and feeling lead to a deeply felt sense of insecurity.. We begin to withdraw moments after we hear the words you have dementia for psychological reasons, and this process continues and accelerates as our hardware and our software begin to act up. Sometimes, less and less as the symptoms increase it is simply a matter of retrieval. We forget, we lose the ability to retrieve and reconstruct the past, reaching approximately the same conclusions each time we try to recall a specific occurrence. The ability to think outside of ourselves (our own self made and maintained box) begins to fail us, which in and of itself is spooky! I wish that minds whole than mind, more creative than mine would spend some time trying to figure out just what happens and why when the symptoms of dementia begin to overwhelm our efforts to hide them from the world outside of our own selves. I wish we put much, much more effort in trying to understand what dementia is and how it works than how to make it go away/stay away/never come int he first place. Until we figure this out we are doomed to see people with dementia in simplistic terms - they are more forgetful than others. Richard
Posted on: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 06:06:31 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015