We have the stark, cold reality of the existence of
the nefarious disease. It is Alzheimer's disease. I'm happy to welcome to the thirty five Caresey Morning, So Lisa's Skinner, a behavioral health are expert in the field of Alzheimer's and related Dimentia's twenty year career as a community councilor and regional director of a senior care facilities, She's helped thousands of families find the best care options for their loved ones, holds an administrator's license through the California Department of
Social Services, and has written a book Were Talking About Today. Truth Lies in Alzheimer's, Its secret faces. Lisa, it's a pleasure to have you on the program.
Oh, good morning. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it very much.
I'm happy to my personal experience with Alzheimer's. My father passed away a couple of years ago as a consequence of Alzheimer's, and we had to live with and cope with the decline, the gradual and then accelerating decline of his memory and his ability to take care of himself, and ultimately had to be in a full time care facility because the caretakers has simply become exhausted and props and so much love to my mom and how hard
she worked to try to keep up with them. But it's such a tragic, tragic disease, so I have a connection with it. But I'm kind of curious to know how you got involved in treating folks with Alzheimer's and what prompted you to write the book.
Well similar experience to yours. I've actually had eight of my own family members live with one of the brain diseases that caused dementia. And my very first experience was about fifty years ago with my grandmother. I went over to her house. She worked very close to me, I grew up with her, and I thought it was just going to be a normal conversation. We sat down and she started telling me about these birds that were living in her mattress and they would come out at night
and peck her face. And then she pointed to her walls and asking, you see those rats running all over the place. They're invading my home. And then finally she told me that there were these men who were constantly breaking into her home. They were stealing her personal possessions, her jewelry, and she was convinced that they were going to do away with her and take over her life.
So what I was witnessing, I mean, I was a teenager, unbeknownst to me, was a delusion, yeah, or a false belief with the birds living in her mattress, a hallucination with the rats running all over the house. And another common symptom that we see with dimension and Alzheimer's disease is paranoia and suspiciousness. And I had no idea that there was even anything wrong with my grandmother. This was the first time that I saw any signs of anything unusual.
And I asked my mother, you know, I just had the most bizarre visit with Grandma, but it seems like there's something wrong with her. And she says, yeah, she's been diagnosed with what they call back then, senile dementia. And I said, well, why didn't you tell me? I mean, I was completely caught off guard. I didn't know what
to do. I didn't know what to say. He says, we don't talk about this, and that was really the mindset back then when it came to, you know, brain diseases, and because people really thought it was a mental health issue back then. So anyway, I ended up going to getting my degree in college and I went My degree was in human behavior, and I was absolutely fascinated by it. So I had an opportunity to take this position in an elder care facility called a community counselor, and basically
it was helping families. I would do all the assessments and explain to them what the advantages were of senior
living and memory care and assisted living. And I just ended up working my way up to this regional director position and I ended up managing five buildings and training all the staff, and I received a lot of training myself on better practices and what a new ideology that was basically becoming popular called a person centered approach to care versus the therapy that was being used for people living with dementia at the time, which was called reality
orientation therapy. And what that meant was if a person living with dementia was having a false belief, if they were confused about the time of day, or the day of the week, or anything else, we were expected to correct them and kind of steer them back into our reality,
which was what was current true. And we just found through decades of that practice that it didn't work because, as you probably realized with your own personal experience, once a person living with dementia is locked onto a belief, there is absolutely nothing anybody can say or do to change that belief until they've kind of, you know, change it themselves.
And right, so you got to kind of you have to kind of roll with it.
Then you do. That's exactly That's exactly what you know. Years and years and years of trying to effectively communicate with somebody with cognitive decline, with brain disease, we found out that it was just really exacerbating anxiety and anger and frustration and you know, really led to catastrophic reactions
and meltdowns. So I was trained on this new approach to dementia communication, and you know, in the earliest phase of it, and I saw firsthand the difference it made in the lives of everybody involved, the family members, the caregivers, the people living with dementia, and really became an expert in it, and I started teaching it and bringing it to people's attention and teaching people how to approach these
situations like I had with my grandmother. Okay, how do you respond with somebody all of a sudden, that of nowhere starts telling you that birds are living in their mattress, coming out at night and pecking at your face. You don't argue with them and try to say you're crazy, that couldn't even possibly happen. You join them where they're.
At, like what kind of birds? What color are they? They're just kind of again rolling with it and just acknowledging what they think and not resisting them on the cap, which brings about that frustration you're talking about.
That's exactly what was discovered to be true. And so this is basically what led me to write the book, was to raise awareness about what living with Alzheimer's disease was truly like for the people who have it, the family members, the caregivers, And because I discovered in my career helping families that probably the biggest piece that was missing to this whole entire puzzle was people's lack of understanding of what these diseases are doing to the brain
and the symptoms that show up and the behaviors that show up. And once people understand that and then are properly guide on how to effectively respond, then the whole entire experience and journey for everybody involved can be so much less stressful, and they can focus on what really matters. Yeah, quality time with their loved one, at least.
The Skinner, author of the book we're talking about today two, thrives on Alzheimer's at Secret Faces, which provides you with all this information that you know I'm thinking about. You were focusing on the frustration and the anxiety that the Alzheimer's, the struggle the person struggling with Alzheimer's gets when you resist what their perception of reality is. But that in turn, their resistance to that also agitates the person trying to tell them that no, they're not birds in the bed.
So you both get on this downhill slope and nobody benefits from that. I can see the point you're making on this. You can't cure the Alzheimer's. This person is going to carry those beliefs. There's no pill that they can take to make it go away. There's no point in arguing with them about it, right, I mean, isn't that kind of what it boils down to?
Yeah, you're spot on, absolutely spot on on that. You You couldn't have said that oral, realistic truth. Yeah, but you've experienced it.
Yeah, yeah, And I resisted, you know, I was, you know, like he wouldn't remember my mom's face or who she was. And I was like, why don't we get the wedding pictures out and look, you know you here's your here's when you got married. And and I remember my sister telling me, Brian know that that's not going to work. That's pointless. And it sounded so cold. It seemed like such a simple solution, and it's not. You learn that
over time having lived through it. So I'm glad you wrote the book and provide people with this and maybe take the weight off their shoulders that they don't need to run around and argue with this person struggling and it's not worth the time effort, and it makes everybody worse off. I just appreciate that perspective. Now before we part company at Lisa Skinner, I we all have what we call senior moments. How can people distinguish between normal
aging forgetfulness? Because coming up on age sixty this September, you know, I do have my days and mild versus mild cognitive IMPAIRMENTI and dementia. There are there telltale signs that we can like be a red flag to people.
Absolutely, yes, and what you just described happens to all of us probably starting around when we put our phone down, we can't remember where it is you find our car keys, we walk into a room and I would remember why we were Yeah.
You made me feel better, very very normal.
But to that point it starts freaking people out because the first thing they think of is, oh, is this the first sign that I'm going to get Alzheimer's dizzy?
Right, especially when your dad passed away from it and your mom's mother passed away from it too, So it's like, yeah, got me completely freaked out.
It's like, uh oh, and it is there were one fear that people have believe it or not starting about the age of fifty five, and you can can't blame them. So the best way to kind of described in a nutshell, because we don't have a whole lot of time to really go into no, no, just brief speaking to which you're out of time in the segment.
Conclude your thought leaside because we need to get this information.
Okay, So the frequency and the severity of the memory loss is really key. So if it's just happening once in a while, then that can pretty much be considered normal age forgetfulness. If it starts to happen more often, more frequently, and more severely, then it's probably moved into more uh, you know, a more obvious stage of miild cognitive impairment. Okay. What really separates between those and full blown dementia is if the underlying cause is truly a
brain disease like Alzheimer's causing the memory deficits. Okay, and most people aren't even diagnosed till they're in their mid stages because that is when the symptoms become so obvious, okay, that you need to go get a professional assessment. I yeah, starting.
I appreciate you writing the book to provide this information because there's so much of this floating around out in the world. It seems like it's becoming a more and more common phenomenon. The truth lies in Alzheimer's its secret faces. Thank you for your time this morning with my listeners, and thanks again for writing the book. Lisa. I appreciate the work that you're doing.