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How might people with a dementia engage in meaningful therapeutic work? To coincide with World Alzheimer’s Month, Danuta Lipinska continues her myth-busting five-part series about the value and diversity of counselling people with a dementia. Today, she discusses communication, the Core Conditions, and Christine Bryden’s helpful metaphor of a tin of baked beans.

To mark World Alzheimer’s Month this September, Danuta Lipinska embarks on a five-part series about the value and diversity of counselling people with a dementia. Every Friday, she will be debunking a common myth about the condition as she shares insights and stories from her long career in dementia care. Today, she addresses the misconception that therapy isn’t ‘for’ people with a dementia.

What therapeutic challenges and opportunities arise when a client with dementia enters nursing or palliative care? In the concluding part of her blog series coinciding with Alzheimer’s Month, psychotherapist and author Dr Esther Ramsay-Jones discusses working through this latter stage in the trajectory of dementia.

How does grief counselling differ when the client has dementia? In the fourth part of her blog series coinciding with Alzheimer’s Month, psychotherapist and author Dr Esther Ramsay-Jones explores the experience of bereavement through the lens of dementia, including working with hallucinations, metaphor and felt-absence.

Powerful projections, loss of recognition, longstanding relationship dynamics: caring for a family member with dementia is a complex emotional task. In the third part of her blog series coinciding with Alzheimer’s Month, psychotherapist and author Dr Esther Ramsay-Jones looks at how psychotherapy can help carers understand their own feelings, and the communications of the person with dementia

Helping clients to live with dementia often involves steering a path between despair, denial and early relationship dynamics. In the second part of her blog series coinciding with Alzheimer’s Month, psychotherapist and author Dr Esther Ramsay-Jones considers how therapeutic input can support people with dementia, and their partners, to sit with uncertainty.

There are limited talking therapy services for people with dementia. Yet psychotherapists can play an important role at every stage as this progressive condition unfolds. To mark the start of Alzheimer’s Month in September, psychotherapist and author Dr Esther Ramsay-Jones begins a five-part blog series on working psychodynamically in dementia care – beginning with the feelings that may attend a diagnosis.