It dawned on me the other day what drives the approach to dementia: it’s a resources led model.  It has taken me a while to try to make sense of what has happened to Maureen following stroke:  it’s predominantly a lack of resources that is pushing us down a road to nowhere.  It is financial expediency not any theoretical model that is driving the approach to dementia in this country.  A couple of statements from medical practitioners help to put the flesh on the bones of this rather stark assertion.

I recall a conversation with a G P’s, a couple of years ago, who asserted something along the lines of ‘we are trying to keep people alive beyong their sell by date’.  This may appear to be a cynical view but at a time of austerity, she is at the forefront of rationing dwindling resources.  Then we are told by the Clinical Psychologist from the Stroke Team that Maureen is being referred to the Memory Service because they have more resources to deal with dementia that her department.  A few months later Maureen is cast adrift by the Memory Service with a diagnosis of Vascular Dementia.  Then matters get worse as the protocol for treating dementia is Prescribed Disengagement (Swaffer): preparing for the end of your life.

My struggle in accepting this approach to dementia isn’t just that my wife is being placed on the scrap heap, and left to find her way to activities in the community.  It’s with a biomedical model from a mental health persective.  Yet dementia is brain injury!

If you are viewed as someone recovering from stroke then neuroplasticity features in any dialogue about treatment plans.  No wonder those in the Memory Service are frightened to use the term  DEMENTIA.   They know that once that dementia is the diagnosis you are sent out into the community to fend for yourself.  Once outside the system you are on your own: looking for somewehere to find something to your taste.  However, it is unlikely that NEUROPLASTICITY will be paramount in the minds of those kind folk in the community who are only trying to help.