Bus stop for Alzheimers patients

[Note: I wrote this back in July, so I don't know if the Telegraph article is still valid.]

A German nursing home installed a fake bus stop to keep some of its patients from wandering away.

Patients suffering from ailments that degrade their memory, including Alzheimer's disease, don't remember why they're in a facility rather than in their own homes. Confused and afraid, they seek the familiar places they still remember:

“... Their short-term memory hardly works at all, but the long-term memory is still active. They know the green and yellow bus sign and remember that waiting there means they will go home.” The result is that errant patients now wait for their trip home at the bus stop, before quickly forgetting why they were there in the first place.

This is a clever solution to a problem that breaks my heart.

50 First Dates is centered on a woman with an extreme form of short-term memory loss. Being a romantic comedy, you're supposed to take the romance part somewhat seriously (enough to make you care about the couple), and that bothers me a little.

It's wonderful to imagine that love can conquer a mental deficit that prevents one from remembering anything of the last twenty-four hours. In the real world, though, even less severe deficits produce results that are neither funny nor charming. Following complex stories, whether they be suspense novels or the narrative of the BP oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, becomes impossible since the details cannot be retained long enough to put the picture together. Memory is lost in last in, first out order, so the afflicted stop living in the present, mentally. The personality start unravelling, too, as more and more of what made up that personality disappears.

One of my parents suffered from Alzheimer's, or an ailment that effected similar degradation of memory. The only upside was hearing stories I'd never been told, stories from decades past that undoubtedly had been buried under the weight of accumulating later memories that now were vanishing. Otherwise, the experience was deeply unsettling. The forceful personality I'd known for my entire life became an apathetic shell that sometimes forgot to eat. Every day one of us children would visit, in part to check that all was well (even with a daytime caregiver, we worried), and in part to spend time talking; we knew that things likely would worsen to the point where conversation was impossible, and even recognition might be difficult, so we wanted to take advantage of the cogent mentality that remained.

Yet we heard the same stories again and again, which strained our patience. Our visits generally came at the end of long and stressful work days that left us with little energy or patience to cope with a reluctance to eat, or to clean house, or to do any of a hundred other tasks you and I perform as part of what we consider a civilized life.

Mental ailments like Alzheimer's disease do more than take away your memory: they take away your dignity and your deepest sense of self. I'm glad to hear of inventive approaches, like the fake bus stop, to keeping sufferers from these diseases safe without unduly agitating them. It doesn't diminish my sorrowfulness for them one bit, though.