Yowei Shaw

Claudia Dressel is a psychologist who helps people with a neurodegenerative disease and their caregivers figure out how to make life easier and healthier for everyone involved.

When Claudia was in grad school, she actually had no plans to work in dementia care.

She wanted to teach psychology at a university.

But then one day, a friend from school asked for a favor.

Could Claudia come to a senior center and sit with a man who has Alzheimer's while she met with his caregiver?

The man told Claudia about his kids, how he used to work at a department store.

He talked a lot, if not always clearly, but she was able to figure out what he was saying.

Claudia's goal is to not just stop problematic behaviors.

She's focused on holistically helping both caregivers and the care recipient have a nicer time together.

Ryan, of course, is nowhere near that.

So I asked him to give the rundown of a situation, how he can't stop correcting his mother-in-law.

how even when he does try to get help, some of the resources just make him angrier.

He talked about watching this one webinar in a support group that particularly pissed him off.

The webinar presented a bunch of scenarios of what someone with Alzheimer's might do and asked how the caregiver should respond.

One of them was like,

Ryan holds up his phone to show us a video from Instagram.

The caregiver is looking into the camera with a knowing look on her face and hits the camera in time to the beat of the song with the caption, Stop correcting them.

When we return, Claudia tells Brian about the tools he can use to help him stop venting at his mother-in-law.

So Brian is feeling lots of shitty emotions.

He's feeling angry.