Mental Health and Dementia Caregivers: Recognising and Managing Stress and Burnout.
The first and most important thing about stress is to recognise it. It is when you’re under pressure caring for someone with dementia and feel unable to cope. It starts to affect the way you think, your sleep, your digestion and everything about your daily life. You get angry and impatient.
A woman at our local carers’ organisation told me that she felt as if she was failing but that made her try harder. She got up earlier to tackle domestic tasks that she had put off because of her caring duties. She stayed up late trying to deal with the chaos in her home. She wasn’t sleeping enough and began to be chaotic in her own thinking and was worried that she too was developing cognitive impairment.
“Being a carer is a big job at the best of times even if things are going well, and sometimes they don’t go well. In conversation with someone else you may discover sources of help that you didn’t know about that will take some of the pressure off you.”
The second most important thing is to talk about it. It might feel bad to say out loud that caring for someone dependent on you is getting you down, but if your listener knows you and understands the world you are living in they know that you are not a bad person. When you hear carers talk among themselves, one might say, “I wish he was dead!” I have witnessed this myself. Instead of being shocked, almost everyone in the room confessed that they had days like that. They gathered round that person with down to earth ideas for making life easier. Just saying it out loud was a huge relief, and no one thought for a moment that the carer would ever harm her loved one.
Being a carer is a big job at the best of times even if things are going well, and sometimes they don’t go well. In conversation with someone else you may discover sources of help that you didn’t know about that will take some of the pressure off you. You may even find that just talking about it makes you feel better. Often people are stressed because they feel they should be doing more than they already are. Ideas on this website or in one of the books for reducing effort and increasing income might help.
Celebrate small victories when you make it through another day. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Accept that you have done your best and no one can do any better than that. Focus on what you can control and don’t worry about anything else. Take any help that will reduce your carer burden but remember to be specific and to ask people for the help you need.
The best source of support for people who are caring for someone with dementia is often your local carers organisation, or dementia organisation. Find them through this website.
