Alzheimer’s Speaks host Lori La Bey joins Suzanne to talk about family caregivers and how we can help support them. There are about 70 million adult family caregivers in the USA, and they spend an average of 20 hours caring for someone else each week. Many of them spend more than 40 hours a week. They allow the rest of the family to go on with their everyday lives. They make sacrifices, they hit roadblocks, they are overwhelmed, they’re stressed out, and they’re trying to juggle caregiving, their career, and their family.
Lori says, “I just came from two support groups that I do today, and they all said the most challenging thing to a dementia caregiver is patience. ‘I need more patience. I’m exhausted, I’m tired. I don’t know how to deal with something.’ And that level of guilt when somebody snaps or doesn’t do something as well as they know they could have. And they’re very disappointed in themselves, because they really do want to care well, but we don’t teach people how to care and we need to share our stories. To take that aloneness out of the equation is huge.
“The one thing I hear when I go speak is: How do I fix my siblings? How do I get them to care? How do we work as a group? People really, really struggle with that, and when you hear of a family who has it all figured out, I really let them know they are the unicorn in the room. It’s not the norm.”
Learn more:
Alzheimer’s Speaks: https://alzheimersspeaks.com
Answers for Elders is part of the SeniorResource Network: https://www.seniorresource.com/
