Shhhhhh...

In my first blog I touched on my gran’s journey with Alzheimer’s disease. The second blog was about how the disease impacted on our family. For this blog I am going to talk about the disease itself and the stigma attached to it.

What do I mean by a stigma? According to the Collins English Dictionary, ‘If something has a stigma attached to it, people think it is something to be ashamed of’. Maybe being ashamed of it is a bit strong but I think we were all guilty of denying that gran had Alzheimer’s. Maybe this is because we didn’t want gran to be thought of as ‘gyte’.

For some reason Alzheimer’s has a stigma attached to it when other diseases don’t. Why?

We were all guilty of not ‘owning up’ to the disease. Nobody suggested to gran that she might have dementia – how on earth are you supposed to bring that into the conversation? Gran knew her memory was poor. She went to a memory clinic but on the day ‘passed’ the tests, fooling the professionals!! I think that my gran deep down was determined not to be diagnosed with dementia. If we had all known more about this disease, we would’ve been better prepared for what lay ahead. As it was, we all pretended for as long as we could that it was just a bad memory that she had.

Back to the stigma. Alzheimer’s is nothing to be embarrassed about. Scared of or worried about, yes but not embarrassed about. As with any disease, the earlier it is diagnosed the better it can be treated so it is really important to be aware and sympathetic of the disease and its symptoms.

The Alzheimer’s Association talks about overcoming this stigma and focuses on 5 different ways to do this. They say to talk about the disease openly, to dispel misconceptions, to have a closely knitted network of friends and family or other support group, to challenge people’s denial of the disease and to encourage the people who are diagnosed with the disease to speak out and raise awareness. You can read more about this here.

If you find yourself in the same position I was, knowing something wasn’t right I hope my blog encourages you to find out more in the early stages because this will definitely help in the long run. My next blog is about what we did when things took a real turn for the worst.