Monthly Archives: April 2012
Don’t be afraid of asking for help
Don’t be afraid of asking for help – carer mum, Joyce
‘Help is there’ … Joyce Butters with her son, Paul.
UP until Paul Butters started school, his parents had no idea he was suffering from a learning disability due to a lack of oxygen at birth.
But after his diagnosis, Joyce became not just his mum but also his full-time carer.
Two of her three children have now left home, but at 42 Paul is still at the forefront of his mum’s mind.
“Everything I do I have to take Paul and his needs into consideration,” she said.
A passion for caring
“You just have to get on with it.”
Ian Hobin’s day is a million miles away from your average teenage boy.
To start with the 16-year-old is up at 6.30am every morning to help his younger brother get ready for school, take him to the gates and then get himself off to college.
We should have our own Dementiaville
Dementiaville, or Hogewey, as it’s actually called, was started 20 years ago a short distance from Amsterdam
Miriam Stoppard
I ’m putting my family on notice: when I start dwindling into dementia I want them to put me into “Dementiaville”, the experimental village complete with supermarket, hairdresser, pub and theatre in the Netherlands.
Trained staff and carers are disguised as waitresses, hairdressers, barmen and barmaids, friends and extended family members. Not for me those soulless hospital wards where 15 to 20 people sit motionless and expressionless watching TV, the monotony only relieved by meals and medication.
That’s not living. It’s a kind of dying. And we’re committing almost a million people with dementia a year to this living death. What surprises me is that as a medical profession, as a government and as a society, we stand by and allow this horrible state of affairs to continue.
Dementiaville, or Hogewey, as it’s actually called, was started 20 years ago a short distance from Amsterdam by a woman and five other founder members who were determined to give patients with dementia a decent life.
