In this sixth installment of brief excerpts from each chapter in the book You Oughta Know: Acknowledging, Recognizing, and Responding to the Steps in the Journey Through Dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease, we look at the fifth step in the journey through dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease.

This post includes an excerpt from chapter 5, which provides a thorough look at how to acknowledge, recognize, and respond to the fifth step in the journey through dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease when paranoia emerges.

This chapter shows why and how paranoia is part of the journey through dementias and Alzheimer’s disease, the impact it has on our loved ones, and how we as caregivers should respond to them both medically and personally with kindness, gentleness, and understanding.

This fifth step requires a lot of love, a lot of commitment, a lot of sheer determination, a lot of perseverance, and a lot of courage on our part as caregivers because this, of all the steps, can be most brutal emotionally to us personally because it will literally chew us up and spit us out on a continual basis all the way through it.

This chapter offers practical and accessible information to help us and our loved ones navigate this step successfully and intact.

This series begins with the forward to the book and an explanation of why I wrote this book and why you should read it.

The series continues with the inclusion of excerpts from Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, and, with this post, Chapter 5.

The steps in the journey through dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease are presented sequentially in the order in which they actually appear in the course of these neurological diseases.

There are no other books that literally walk through each step in sequential order as they emerge in the journey through dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease.

Additionally, there is no other book that discusses:

1. The process we as caregivers acknowledge each new step – there is an acceptance period that we have to go through
2. The process we use to guide ourselves and our loved ones with dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease through the recognition phase of each step
3. The concrete, loving, and practical information on how we should respond and how we can help guide our loved ones’ responses

These are the things that make You Oughta Know: Acknowledging, Recognizing, and Responding to the Steps in the Journey Through Dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease unique and stand alone in the plethora of books about dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease.

Excerpt “Chapter 5: ‘Confusion Never Stops, Closing Walls and Ticking Clocks’”

“Pervasive paranoia is the next step in the journey of dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease. At some point, hallucinations and paranoia tend to overlap – the hallucinations, especially if they’re scary will elicit panic and anxiety – but paranoia eventually stands on its own as a distinct step in the journey.

Paranoia has a complicated root system that we’ll break down into its components so that we understand why it occurs and what it looks like.

1. One of the roots of paranoia in our loved ones with dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease is confusion and fear. There is self-awareness, at this point, within our loved ones that something is really wrong. They don’t know what it is, but the feedback around them, spoken and unspoken, tells them that they can’t trust themselves. 

   Persistent hallucinations leave them with blurred lines between what’s real and what’s not. Constant corrections to the information our loved ones believe is true creates widening doubt. Repeated proofs that disprove what our loved ones believe to be accurate create insecurity. 

   All of this also creates anger and fear because humans are wired to trust themselves – their reasoning, their assessments, their intuitions, their processing of the external world – more than to trust any other human being. When that innate ability is constantly challenged and proven faulty, it’s scary and it is infuriating.”