Taming the Chaos of Dementia

If you've ever cared for someone with dementia, you might empathize with Alice, who tumbled down a rabbit hole and discovered herself in an unhappy world where time moved oddly, animals and plants spoke, but mostly to berate you. Familiar objects became terribly out of scale. If you're caring for someone with dementia now, you might feel like someone changed the rules of reality and that you need a guide, preferably someone kinder than the perennially late rabbit.

This book supports the journey—taken by both the caregiver and the person with dementia—providing loved ones with practical recommendations and enriched with human empathy. This book helps ease the stress by offering interventions and non-pharmaceutical therapeutic suggestions. It helps decode dementia's visceral world and supports non-cognitive human experiences. It shares stories of real people struggling to survive the challenges presented by dementia paired with practical examples of interventions that target the miseries of dementia behaviors, triggers, and causalities induced by them. The book provides options in the art of caregiving alongside the power of place, furnishings, light, color, technology, nature, and the senses.

Barbara Huelat explores options in human engagement, the experience of destinations, positive distractions, familiar settings, furnishings, light, color, technology, nature, and the emotion of the senses. She offers design interventions that support the family caregivers in functional and emotional outcomes. No cure exists for dementia, but the tips, tools, strategies and suggestions include here provide tools for caregivers and those with dementia to make the experience more comfortable and calm.

Barbara J. Huelat, FASID, AAHID, EDAC, is nationally recognized for work in patient-centered design. Her three decades as a design practitioner cover virtually all types, components and sizes of domestic and international healthcare, government, and VA facilities. Currently, she is Design Principal of the interiors firm Healing Design in Alexandria, VA. She is a past president of the American Academy of Healthcare Interior Designers. Barbara has been honored with numerous design awards for projects of excellence, as well as personal recognition for ASID, Designer of Distinction, Humanities Design Award, Luminary Award and Fellow. Huelat has authored two books: Healing Environments: Design for the Body Mind & Spirit and Healing Environments, What’s the Proof? Barbara lectures frequently on a spectrum of healthcare design topics. She resides in Alexandria, VA.

Sharon Pochron is faculty in the Sustainability Studies Program at Stony Brook University. She runs an environmental science laboratory and has published many peer-reviewed articles on topics ranging from caregiving for dementia to primate behavior. She has also published nature articles for kids in places like Muse magazine and Highlights for Children. She lives in Stony Brook, NY.

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