Imagine breast cancer being taken for granted. That no research is being done and no new drugs are being sought, that no one knows about early diagnosis and successful treatment. In such a world, Samantha from Sex and the City would die, and her friend Carrie, taking off her mourning dress, would write something like “This can happen to any of us” in her column.
Dementia today is perceived in this way — as a natural companion of old age. And each family is left alone with the tragedy of losing the identity of a loved one. No hope for improvement. Waiting for death. So dementia is no less terrible than cancer. And she doesn’t have her own pink ribbon and the Together Against Cancer movement.
- «My mother has dementia»
Dementia: start learning today
In order to begin the fight against the causes of dementia and attract financial flows to scientific research, society needs to understand the depth of the problem. To this end, the United Kingdom’s Alzheimer’s Foundation, the most common cause of dementia, has launched a #sharetheorange awareness campaign. It is no coincidence that the famous English actor Christopher Eccleston became the face of this campaign. His father Ronnie died of vascular dementia after fourteen years of fighting the disease.
“We need to think differently about dementia. We need to stop seeing dementia as an inevitability, something that will happen to all of us as we get older,” says Christopher Eccleston. If we don’t do that, we’ll never really start to fight it. Diseases are the cause of dementia, and they can be overcome. We have curbed diseases such as cancer and heart disease — today such diagnoses are no longer a sentence.
- Dementia: how to live with those who are nearby
People with dementia also deserve hope. The purpose of this video is to show that dementia is caused by physical processes that can be stopped. While scientists are fighting dementia in the lab, we can all fight the fatalism and misconceptions about dementia that prevail in our society, just by sharing a video that clearly shows how the brain of a sick person changes.