
Alzheimer's Disease Support Group
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia and characterized by progressive cognitive deterioration with declining activities of daily living and neuropsychiatric symptoms or behavioral changes. An early symptom is memory loss (amnesia), usually manifesting as minor forgetfulness that becomes pronounced with illness progression, with relative...
Betty
Sadly no two AD patients are exactly alike so although she may be having many hallucinations it might be "normal" for her.
When my husband started having hallucinations and becoming very hyper his doctor put him on risperdal which is usualy used for manic/depression and schiophernia (sp) and that has really helped him settle down. Before that he was waking me up all night thinking weird things were going on.
I don't know what causes it but I quit challenging him about them and found ways to calm him without challenging what he believed he was seeing.
I got to the point that I basically went along, as best I could, with his hallucinations. This usually kept him calm. I don't know if it is right to play along with someone with AZ but I thought it was worse to provoke him.
I know years ago when I worked in nursing homes taking care of people with "senile dementia" a.k.a. alzheimers we were told to keep reorientating them to reality but I never saw any positive results from that and for most of them "REALITY" was not all that great a place to come back to anyway.
Anyone else care to share their experiences?