How can you tell when your parent with early dementia is telling you the truth?
My mom still lives independently, moving her into Sr/assisted living soon. She will be penniless due to bad financial planning and buying and selling three cars in about one week with no one's help last winter. She mixes facts with fiction often.
Even if you are a human lie detector, strongly empathic and have studied your mother for all the years you’ve been on earth, it will be difficult to tell if she is ‘giving you accurate, reality based information’. The reason for that is once they come up with a story, it becomes ‘truth’ to them, so they aren’t really lying to you.
I go by whether the story defies logic or is just too fantastical to have happened. But I really don’t think the dementia sufferer means to lie, they are just very confused.
Investigate the story before you react. Take what your mom says with a grain of salt.
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I go by whether the story defies logic or is just too fantastical to have happened. But I really don’t think the dementia sufferer means to lie, they are just very confused.
Investigate the story before you react. Take what your mom says with a grain of salt.