Dementia Care The Person Centered Approach Explained

26 Jun 2026 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

1:31

In this segment, the speaker describes how her professional training in dementia care shifted from the older Reality Orientation Therapy to a person‑centered approach. Reality Orientation Therapy aims to correct a person with dementia’s disoriented perception and steer them back to a “healthy” reality. The speaker argues that this model overlooks the fact that the individual’s reality, though incongruent with the caregiver’s, is fully real to them. She illustrates the point with a personal story about her grandmother, who, due to dementia, no longer recognized her and clung to her own internal narrative about rats, men, and birds. The speaker emphasizes that a person‑centered approach respects and works within the person’s lived reality rather than trying to overwrite it, acknowledging that both realities coexist but are misaligned.

Chapters

And the reason why is because my grandmother believed if this had happened that way, just like she believed in the rats and she believed in the men and she believed in the birds, she— if she stated that to me, it's because she believed in her reality, in her mind, that she didn't recognize me. She didn't have a clue who I was. So I've been trained to practice what's called a person-centered approach to dementia care. It's been around maybe 20 years. It was called Reality Orientation Therapy when I first started doing this professionally and counseling families. The difference is Reality Orientation Therapy emphasizes correcting and fixing and trying to steer the person with dementia back into the healthy brain, the brain of the, the healthy person's reality. Now, what people didn't quite understand is her reality is just as real to her as my reality is to me, but they are not aligned. They are incongruent. But that doesn't mean that she doesn't, um, 100% believe what she's saying. Yes.