People With Dementia Quotes & Sayings

I'm really close to my mom, but things with my dad have been different. He has dementia and watching him change, I've actually started to think that it's a purer state for people. Because he operates as if he's a child and everything is new, which seems more honest. — Blake Butler

A lot of people have dementia, which is great, because then they don't recognize me. — Erykah Badu

Low levels of vitamin D in older people can double the risk of developing dementia in later life, according to one of the biggest studies of its kind into the nutritional supplement. — Anonymous

Medicine and society have entered into a folie a deaux regarding medicine's importance in gigantic population ills. We believe that genetics and pills and enzymes bring us health. We wait for the dementia cure (the obesity cure, the diabetes cure) rather than changing our society to decrease incidence and severity. We slash social welfare programs and access to GPs and ignore the downstream effect this will have on future generations.
To reduce non-communicable disease, the actions we need to take are societal: make it easier for people to move and eat well, strengthen education, promote community participation and meaningful work. Our collective delusion is that we can have all the benefits such a society would bring without the structural supports necessary to bring it into being, that we can attain health by inventing and buying drugs.
It is hard to know which is the more utopian vision: magic pills or a society serious about prevention. — Karen Hitchcock

My experience of people in dementia is that a lot of their personality, a lot of their knowledge, a lot of their experience is still there but there's not a direction connection that they can just reach out and get it and then bring it back. — Walter Mosley

The divine right of kings may now be acknowledged as a fabrication, a falsified permit for prideful dementia and impulsive mayhem. The inalienable rights of certain people, on the other hand, seemingly remain current: somehow we believe they are not fabrications because hallowed documents declare they are real. — Thomas Ligotti

A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self - a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it. There is a theatrical quality about all this, and during the next several days, as I went about stolidly preparing for extinction, I couldn't shake off a sense of melodrama - a melodrama in which I, the victim-to-be of self-murder, was both the solitary actor and lone member of the audience. — William Styron

A dementia sufferer effuses delight and notices very different things when taken out in her wheelchair. Such people can teach us to see again the little things that make a big difference. They can show us how to enjoy familiar environments with fresh new eyes. — Jane Wilson-Howarth

We've had numerous people diagnosed with Alzheimer's who got better; they just come out of it; they are leading normal lives today. And then, of course, what the doctors say is it's not Alzheimer's. You run into that Catch-22 all the time. They say, well, it was probably just a temporary premature dementia, and they write-off the recovery to preserve their ignorance. — Richard M. Schulze

Even though people experiencing dementia become unable to recount what has just happened, they still go through the experience -- even without recall.

The psychological present lasts about three seconds. We experience the present even when we have dementia. The emotional pain caused by callous treatment or statements occurs during that period. The moods and actions of people with dementia are expressions of what they have experienced, whether they can use language and recall, or not. — Judy Cornish

Seven hundred thousand people who have dementia in this country are not heard. I'm fortunate; I can be heard. Regrettably, it's amazing how people listen if you stand up in public and give away $1 million for research into the disease, as I have done. — Terry Pratchett

But I've noticed that people got the most irrational whenever family was around - while simultaneously losing their ability to distinguish reason from insanity. I call it familial dementia. — Jim Butcher

Dementia isn't the only place that memories are found to be flawed - people find out they can't rely on their memories every day. People blindsided in relationships. People who find out their truth is a lie. People pulled from trauma. People awakened, as in Anna and Eve. I wondered: If you can't use memories to steer your life, what can you use? I didn't know. It was why I had to write this book. — Sally Hepworth

Those with dementia are still people and they still have stories and they still have character and they're all individuals and they're all unique. And they just need to be interacted with on a human level. — Carey Mulligan

My mother passed away of complications of dementia. As you get older, it really makes you realize how many people are touched by this disease. — Paul Coffey

Recent studies show that people who exercise their minds with stimulating activities throughout their entire lives have a 35-40 percent less chance of developing symptoms of dementia. — Mike Rabe

I am committed to helping Alzheimer's Society in any way I can. My family and I rely on the help of organisations like Alzheimer's Society to help us understand the disease and guide us in the care of my grandmother. It's been a privilege to meet so many people with dementia. — Carey Mulligan

We must be very careful that we do not label persons with dementia by their Behaviours. Labels can often reflect attitudes and can shape how we respond to people. It is not unusual to hear a resident labeled as a "wanderer" or a "hitter". Labels can make people assume the Behaviour reflects the person and fail to recognise that the person is experiencing pain, fear or some other emotional or physical problem that needs to be addressed. Labeling — Peter Gathercole

Bruce Miller, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, studies elderly patients with a relatively common form of brain disease called frontotemporal dementia, or FTD. He's found that in some cases where the FTD is localized on the left side of the brain, people who had never picked up a paintbrush or an instrument can develop extraordinary artistic and musical abilities at the very end of their lives. As their other cognitive skills fade away, they become narrow savants. — Joshua Foer

Sundown is often the worst time of day for people with dementia. They can become restless and difficult. — Laurie Graham

My husband is stricken with dementia, and it's a trick of his condition that events and people from his past are more real to him than what happened five minutes ago. — Laurie Graham

I may be in deep slop if the findings of a new study published in the latest issue of Neurology, journal of the American Academy of Neurology, prove to be true. The study conducted by University of Eastern Finland tested 1,449 people averaging 71 years of age and found that the subjects labeled "highly cynical" had a 2.54 times greater risk of developing dementia than those with the lowest cynicism rating.

I'd better tell my youngest son, Andy, about the study, too. I think he became a cynic before he turned 30, the predictable result of the massive self-administered force-feedings of the Story of Man in his pursuit of a Ph.D. in American history.

In Andy's defense, reading too much, too soon, of our track record on earth would make a cynic of anyone. Fortunately, his perusals have turned him into a champion of the underdog as well, another inevitability of historical research, particularly studies of our brutal conquest of the American West. — Lionel Fisher

Supplements are very important, especially a multiple vitamin. The American Medical Association now says we should take one. And fish oil because it has omega 3 fatty acids and they have been found to lower depression, dementia, ADD, and people who kill themselves. So fish oil supplements; I have been taking them for years, I actually scanned my brain before and after and it's better. — Daniel Amen

I'm one of those who cut off seeing people after a certain time, when the weight is gone and they sound like the dementia is very advanced - I don't want to see that. I don't even go in to look at the body. That's not my last memory. — Bill Cosby

I never understood people who said their greatest fear was public speaking, or spiders, or any of the other minor terrors. How could you fear anything more than death? Everything else offered moments of escape: a paralyzed man could still read Dickens; a man in the grips of dementia might have flashes of the must absurd beauty. — David Benioff

You believe that some people have dementia and some people do not, but that is not correct. All people have dementia - some are simply in worse condition than others. After all, most people with dementia are unaware that anything is wrong with them. — Hiroshi Yamamoto

There are all sorts of losses people suffer - from the small to the large. You can lose your keys, your glasses, your virginity. You can lose your head, you can lose your heart, you can lose your mind. You can relinquish your home to move into assisted living, or have a child move overseas, or see a spouse vanish into dementia. Loss is more than just death, and grief is the gray shape-shifter of emotion. — Jodi Picoult

I do know people and there are people in my family who have had Alzheimer's and dementia, and I appreciate the importance of communication and having contact with them. Communicating is an interesting thing with a condition like that. Sometimes it's difficult to communicate. If the brain becomes atrophied or certain channels of the brain become atrophied, then contact is what becomes really important. — Elliott Gould

I thought it such a shame that our culture had not devised a way to defang old age. A sophisticated civilization wouldn't ridicule senility, it would elevate it, worship it, wouldn't it? We would train ourselves to see poetry in the nonsense of dementia, to actually look forward to becoming so untethered from the world. We'd make a ceremony of casting off our material goods and confining ourselves to a single room, leaving all our old, abandoned space to someone new, someone young, so that we could die alone, indifferent to our own decay and lost beauty. (127 — Timothy Schaffert

longitudinal study of people over age 75, conducted over a period of 21 years by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, looked at whether activities from playing cards to swimming to doing housework affected cognitive ability. Almost none of the physical activities had any effect on dementia rates except for one: partner dancing, which lowered the risk by 76 percent. No other activity came anywhere near being as effective at protecting people from cognitive decline!3 — Christiane Northrup