Dementia Care. Skills for enabling people with dementia and their Essay

Dementia Care. Skills for enabling people with dementia and their carers - Essay Example But "dementia does not only involve an impairment of intellect and memory, since just about every sphere of psychological functioning can also change or become disrupted in some way. Thus personality, emotional stability, behavior toward others (e.g. becoming aggressive when previously passive and tolerant), speech and communication and self-care may well change for the worse." (Done and Thomas, 1999, p.475) At this age people need empathy and emotional support, so along with the other carers I, rely on a humanistic person centered approach to effectively communicate with these people. This approach has been very fruitful for me in achieving success professionally. The humanistic person centered approach helps in getting the attention of the person, one is dealing with. This is a psychological way of dealing with people suffering from dementia. While applying this approach, I do not believe in doing things instead for adequate effectiveness, I rely on building a high quality interpersonal interaction with my clients. Through this approach my thoughts and feelings get closely involved with my client's thoughts and feelings. ... his socio psycho approach believed that for therapeutic growth, it is very important to give the client unconditional positive regard, empathy and congruence. He also believed that a client should not be considered a client but person, an individual. This way it becomes easier for the carer to understand him in a better way. Hence I approach my clients in the following way: I try to build a psychological contact with the person. I understand that they are very vulnerable, anxious and in state of incongruence at this phase of their lives. So I try to be integrated and congruent as much as possible. I try to develop unconditional positive regard for them. Simultaneously, I try to effectively communicate with the client by trying to build an empathic understanding of his internal frame of mind. By doing all this I get successful in communicating unconditional positive regard and empathic understanding to him to some extent. The following are the three important elements of the humanistic person centred approach: Unconditional positive regard: This can be described as a non-possessive warmth, respect, acceptance, prizing and caring for an individual. The person should be made felt that he is significant irrespective of his mental condition. According to Nelson-Jones "unconditional positive regard does not mean that therapists need, from their frame of reference, to approve of all their clients' behaviours. Rather, unconditional positive regard is an attitude and philosophical orientation, reflected in therapist behaviour, that clients are more likely to move forward if they feel prized for their humanity and they experience an emotional climate of safety and freedom in which, without loosing their therapist's acceptance, they can show feelings and relate events."