Rethinking Communication guide to advanced dementia

5 What led you to pick up this book? Perhaps someone you love has dementia or you work with people living with this illness. Maybe you are actively looking for suggestions about how you can stay in emotional contact, even as dementia reaches its advanced stages. It is common to believe that dementia can progress so far that it makes it almost impossible to ‘find’ the person inside. It can seem as if they have disappeared entirely into their illness. Science is now helping us to understand that is not true. Human beings are communicative, right from birth, and they remain so until the very end of life. Our communicative nature is perhaps the characteristic most central to our humanity. This insight provides a basis for thinking deeply about how two different periods of life – infancy and the elder years – are intertwined. That’s why a guide relating to dementia fits well within the connected baby series. The psychologies of dementia and child development are more related than is often imagined.