Thea Brannigan: What to Say When They Forget, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

You have already answered that question eight times. Here is what to say the ninth time - and why the ninth time is the first time for them.

Dementia care is mostly talking. It is the repeated question at four-minute intervals, the accusation about the missing purse, the five o'clock insistence on going home from the house they have lived in for forty years. Families brace for the practical work. What blindsides them is the language - the discovery that the ordinary sentences of a shared life have stopped working, and that nobody handed them replacements.

What to Say When They Forget is a scenario-by-scenario communication guide for dementia caregivers. Not routines. Not schedules. Words: what to say, how to say it, and what to try when what you said made everything worse.

WHAT'S INSIDE

• Why correcting someone backfires - and the three-part response that ends a repeated question instead of restarting it
• Scripts for the hardest questions: "Where's my mother?", "Who are you?", "When am I going home?", "Am I losing my mind?"
• A clear, humane framework for the lying question - validation, selective truth, and when entering their reality is the kind choice
• What to say when you are accused of stealing, and why defending yourself makes it worse
• Reading the escalation curve, so you intervene in the thirty seconds when intervention still works
• Refusal, reframed: bathing, eating, medication, appointments, and getting dressed
• Sundowning and the late-afternoon hours - the environmental fixes that matter more than any phrase
• Connecting when words run short: tone, touch, music, and visits that feel like failure but aren't
• The other conversations: doubting siblings, eleven-minute doctor appointments, children, and paid carers
• A quick-reference phrasebook of the exact sentences that work, plus the ones to stop saying