The Future of Dementia? Get Rid of the Stigma First

I had the most extraordinary experience the other day...

I visited the Silverado Senior Living home in Scottsdale, AZ on Tuesday. With facilities in four states, Silverado provides assisted living communities for people requiring specialized memory care. If I told you that Silverado is the only memory care unit where I can recall hearing words such as "self-actualize," "purpose," "productive" and "success" in reference to seniors with dementia, I think you would begin to understand what makes Silverado different from many memory care facilities.

However, this is not a blog about Silverado. If you would like more information about Silverado facilities, I advise you to go to their web site, www.silveradosenior.com.

I was sitting with the administrator in his office. Silverado has an open door policy; all doors are open unless the open door presents a safety harzard (i.e. the door to the street!). The residents are free to wander in and out of rooms as they wish, including the offices of the staff.

Silverado is in the process of redecorating this particular facility. In the hallway outside the administrator's office, a painter was putting up butcher paper to protect the molding on the wall from paint splatters. Down the hall came CJ, a senior lady with dementia. She noticed that the painter was having some trouble taping the extraordinarily long piece of paper to the wall. He had tape on the first bit of paper, and the rest of the strip was peeling off the wall faster than he could secure it. CJ went over to the wall and held the paper to the wall until the painter could afix it with tape. The painter thanked her profusely for her assistance and she said (and I quote):

Well, why not? The Lord put me here to do something!

And she followed that up with a victory punch up into the air and cried "WOO HOO!"


From babyhood to death, it is our human nature to want to improve, to grow, to work, to contribute, to have purpose. Without this drive to improve, to increase our knowledge, humankind would still be eating raw meat in a cave. However, when someone is diagnosed with dementia, our belief is that the person's life with purpose is over, and we treat them as such.

Part of this tendency is due to our perception of dementia; due to the dementia, this person is acting differently, outside of the norm. We don't like to be outside of our comfort zone. To be outside of our norm is to be weird, to cease to be human. And when a person ceases to be human, they cease to need to develop.

We need to stretch that norm and expand our comfort zone.

In addition, the elderly who have dementia also deal with the stigma of being old. We consider the elderly person's life to be at its natural conclusion. Their potential to improve, to grow, to work, to contribute and to have purpose is limited. They are going to die soon. They aren't really worth our time; if we are going to invest our resources we are going to invest in someone who has potential. (Think of the opposite, a child. We consider a child's life to be FILLED with potential).

We need to think that a person has the potential to change the world even if they are 99 years old; even if a person has 5 more minutes to live, they have the potential to change the direction of someone's life.

Combine the two stigmas, and you have an elderly person with dementia who is outside of our pre-defined norm and has little to no potential. They are not worth our time.

This is what I want to change. I want us to see an 85-year-old person with dementia and see the potential in that person. We need to understand that even a person immobilized by dementia has the potential to change a life with merely a glance or a touch.

I firmly believe in the power of cognitive activity, physical exercise, one-on-one interaction and socialization, living with purpose and feeling needed as a way of slowing the progression of dementia. Once we see the potential, we will see real work being done with people with dementia rather than merely continuing to meet their basic needs of food, shelter and safety while ignoring their higher human needs of self-actualization.

It all starts with you. Help us get there. Expand your norm and see the potential in every human being.

WOO HOO!