As we strive to improve healthcare teams’ insight into appropriate dementia care, one essential is to enable them to see through the eyes of a person with dementia, so that they understand what that person’s experiencing. In that way, they can use their skills to better engage with the person and create positive interactions. Positive approaches and positive language are powerful supports to people living with dementia and to those who live alongside them.
With this in mind, a group of people living with dementia decided a couple of years ago to take positive action. The group – DEEP (The Dementia Engagement and Empowerment Project) – produced a guide so that anyone writing about dementia could support the positive language they wanted to see surrounding dementia-related issues. The link is here: https://dementiavoices.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/DEEP-Guide-Language.pdf , but you could equally access it by Googling its title: Dementia Words Matter.
Meanwhile, I’m sure many of you have seen a very distressing post which circulates via social media and portrays a completely negative view of life with dementia, yet claims to be supporting people living with the condition – and those who, in turn, support them. That post begins: “Someone once said, “when you love someone with dementia …”
I’m asking that any reader who sees that post responds by asking the person who posted it to delete the post and replace it with the DEEP guide, Dementia Words Matter. People who re-post the piece invariably believe they’re supporting the cause, but the opposite is true; they’re spreading a completely negative image of dementia. If we all ask them to replace it with Dementia Words Matter, we’ll be actively spreading a more positive message, following the guidance and wishes of the experts by experience – people actually living with dementia.
Having seen the offending piece one time too many this month, I felt it was time to do what I could to take it out of circulation. I’m sure many of you will be glad to help with that.