Dementia
新島学園高等学校

２年

恩幣礼歌

Have you ever met a person with dementia? Dementia is a type of brain
disease which negatively affects memory and behavior in elderly people. InJapan, since we have an aging society, the number of elderly people withdementia is increasing. The government announced that one in five people willrealized that we all must know more about dementia and change this society
to a better one for its sufferers.
My grandfather passed away one year ago, and a half year later, mygrandmother came to my house to live with my family. My grandmother is aperson with dementia, but we didn’t know how hard it would be to live withher. She started asking us the same things many times, such as “Is dinnerready?” after she had already eaten. She refused to take baths for several
weeks and would smell quite bad. She would suddenly get angry at us for noreason. And she said things like “My wallet’s been stolen!” despite that she
had misplaced it on her own. I was really surprised, because I’d never seen
my grandmother like that. It was difficult for us to communicate with her andunderstand her needs. As a result, we realized we couldn’t live with her, andwe returned her to her own home. But a few days later, I visited her houseand I found that she looked very sad, which also made me feel sad andwonder why we couldn’t have prevented the situation.
I realized that even though we knew my grandmother had dementia, wehadn’t been taught how to cope with it. We caused my grandmother a lot ofhardships because we couldn’t understand her. So in our society, we need asystem where we can learn about dementia. For example, we have a lot ofopportunities to learn how to use AEDs in school and in our everyday lives.
Like this, city or prefectural governments should offer courses to learn about
dementia. In addition, not only adults, but young people should learn about itand how to talk to people with it. Our chances of meeting someone with35

高校生―Ｄ部門

develop dementia by 2025. Through experiences with my grandmother, Idementia will rise in the future, and we need to know how to communicatewith them.
Though the number of people with dementia is increasing in our aging
society, there aren’t enough nursing homes to accommodate them. The nursing
homeinmyareaonly

accepts

seriouscases,

andthey

rejected

mygrandmother. On top of that, there are a limited number of care workers, so
the workers who help her can’t come every day. So we’ll also need to workwith professionals to help people with dementia as volunteers. For instance,
we can cook meals for those who have forgotten how to cook, and we can
高校生―Ｄ部門listen to people who repeat the same words over and over. When someone
gets lost, we can help look for them. There are a lot of things we can do tohelp them. We need to have a system of watching and helping people withdementia in society. By joining volunteer activities like that, we can understandpeople with dementia more deeply and boost our awareness toward them.
The number of people with dementia will increase in the future. Whenthat happens, if we understand it, we can communicate with sufferers morepositively, and help them without being afraid of them or avoiding them. It istrue that the government should take actions to care for sufferers, and medical
practices may get better, but the problem can’t be prevented like viruses canbe with vaccines. Nor will dementia be cured in the near future. So until then,it’s our responsibility to learn as much as we can to make the lives ofsufferers as comfortable as possible. Let’s tackle this problem together!

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