Today, we bring you DAI’s Vice Chair Jerry Wylie's recent Plenary speech from ADI Chicago. Sit down, grab a coffee and put on your seat belts. It is a fabulous, if not challenging ride, especially so for health care professionals and providers, so get yourself ready, relax, and tune in to watch it now here, or later on our YouTube Channel.
Living the U.S. National Dementia Plan
Presented by Jerry Wylie
This is not Jerry's full speech notes, but a blog he wrote very recently, that goes well with it, and covers many of the key messages in his speech. He also presented his speech again at our monthly Webinar yesterday, so those who could not attend ij erson, could hear him live online.
“Living well with Dementia may well be, the best lived experience of my life now that I have recovered from being inhumanly treated”.
What? Inhumanely treated? How, when and why? Read on......
First, our diagnosis is delivered “Without Any Referrals” to support or disease education. No discussion of rehabilitation and No words of encouragement, No mention of hope, how diet & exercise could help. We are given absolutely nothing, zero, nada. To this day, we are still being told to get our affairs in order and, here are some drugs that might help with your symptoms, temporarily.
The end result; we are “delivered directly into suffering” from depression by the very doctors who are paid to keep us well.
Not long after this wonderful experience, most of us, are “abandoned by one or two members of our own family”.
Below, is a chart that shows exactly how we process this situation. We no longer have the ability to properly process what happened and, because we need family more than ever, we are driven even deeper into “long term & unnecessary suffering”.
It took me 1.5 years of preventable, unnecessary suffering, to fight, scratch and claw my way out of the most miserable, vegetable like existence of my life.
“THIS IS NOT JUST MY STORY”!
It’s the story of 50 million other people living with Dementia as well. This treatment is our standard treatment world wide, perhaps, due solely to ignorance.
I can confidently say “The only time” a person with Dementia “really suffers” before end stage, is when we are either unintentionally or, intentionally mistreated. Period.
Clearly, this is cruel, unusual and unacceptable abuse. Clearly this is a violation of our human rights.
When someone is caught abusing a pet, it immediately becomes a huge media/news event and people get arrested. When 50 million people are abused by our doctors and sometimes by family members, nothing is reported and no one is as much as reprimanded.
When harsh words are spoken to us, we can’t process what you said but, we “cannot forget” how you made us feel. Once again, we are unintentionally or, intentionally pushed into“constant, ongoing grief” that we cannot shake off or even come close to processing. Unexplained, it is a life sentence of pain at a time when we desperately needed the opposite.
This is the truth. This is the debilitating, mentally abusive, harmful & “INHUMANE TREATMENT” that is currently happening about every 3 seconds somewhere to virtually defenseless people.
NO, STOP & THINK about this! 50 million people today plus, “10 million more people” every year. This may well be the “Most Inhumane Tragedy of Our Century”!
Now, feel free ask me why I am such a boisterous advocate for people living with Dementia and our Human Rights.
I dare you to ask me why people with Dementia suffer.
“Living well with Dementia may well be, the best lived experience of my life now that I have recovered from being inhumanly treated”.
Jerry Wylie © 2018