Today’s re-blog as part of World Alzheimer’s Month focuses on an article by Susan Macaulay which comments on an open letter to the Worldwide Dementia Community.

“Labelling the reasonable responses of PLWD as symptoms of dementia may be good for the bottom line of pharmaceutical companies, but it’s harmful to PLWD and their carers. It causes care partners, care workers, and medical personnel to misinterpret the actions of PLWD, which in turn causes dementia carers to fail to look for, and therefore identify the true causes of distress in PLWD, as well as to inappropriately use antipsychotics and physical restraints that are counterproductive and largely ineffective in addressing the issue.”

Take off the blindfolds and #BanBPSD: an open letter to the Worldwide Dementia community

In closing this series of blogs for World Alzheimer’s Month, I will leave it to a blog by Wendy Mitchell, aptly titled “Clearly we have much still to do…”

“That’s why I believe it must be so hard for those supporters to hear about us surviving each day as we do when their loved ones have declined quickly. It doesn’t make sense to them because their experience is very different.”

Clearly we have much still to do…