How to Respond to Unfounded Accusations When Dementia Is Involved

Strategies to Overcome Allegations of Theft, Lying, or Other Hurtful Claims

By Valerie Feurich, PAC Team Member

Have you ever been accused of lying or stealing, even though you were just looking to help? Unfortunately, this hurtful scenario can be fairly common in dementia care. As a person’s brain is changing, it can start to link facts and details in weird and unusual ways. This false-memory phenomenon can happen fairly early on, even when a person is only experiencing mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and not yet a true dementia.

In a healthy brain, if an item gets lost, we tend to back-track our last steps in hopes of remembering where we placed it. However, when a brain is affected by dementia, forming new memories is troublesome, therefore making the act of retracing one’s steps extremely difficult. Instead, the brain of a person living with dementia may start to fill the memory gaps with older memories, resulting in stories that don’t quite match reality.

As an example, a person living with dementia may not have any memory of putting the tv remote control into a drawer. Instead, their brain may fill the memory-gap with one from a few days ago, when they placed that same remote onto the side table.