Dementia Friendly Park Rapids Library Resources

Park Rapids Area Library

Sad and funny, wise and honest, Where Memories Go is a deeply intimate account of insidious losses and unexpected joys in the terrible face of dementia, and a call to arms that challenges us all to think differently about how we care for our loved ones when they need us most.

More than 70 brain-stimulating activities for people with memory loss or dementia, including Alzheimer's disease. Physical and mental activities along with social interaction may help maintain your brain health and slow the progress of memory loss and dementia, including Alzheimer's disease. They can also provide a meaningful way to connect. This book is packed with fun and creative ideas, from nature walks, gardening, and exercise to arts, crafts, puzzles, and games. Each activity includes step-by-step instructions, the specific benefits, and ways to adapt the activity for different abilities. Designed for people with memory loss or dementia along with their family, friends, and caregivers.

A "multi-media scrapbook," the video can be enjoyed as either entertainment or as a therapeutic tool for someone with memory loss (including Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia). Creates opportunities for connection, stimulates and entertains, and eases the difficulties of caregiving.

Based on its author's four-year study and 15 years of experience in Alzheimer's and dementia-related care, Alzheimer's Activities That Stimulate the Mind is the only book offering exercises appropriate to each of the four stages of the disease. It features hundreds of exercises across an array of areas and disciplines, including arts and crafts, community outings, physical activity, religion and spirituality, grooming, gardening, music, and many more.

The 36-Hour Day has been an essential resource for families who love and care for people with Alzheimer disease. Whether a person has Alzheimer disease or another form of dementia, he or she will face a host of problems. The 36-Hour Day will help family members and caregivers address these challenges and simultaneously cope with their own emotions and needs.

The perspective and insights offered in We Know How This Ends reveal this daily reality and inspire a way forward for anyone who has suffered major loss and for anyone who surely will. Rather than wallowing in sadness and bitterness, anger and denial, Kramer accepted the crushing ALS diagnosis. The educator and musician recognized that if he wanted a meaningful life, embracing his imminent death was his only viable option. His decision was the foundation for profound, personal reflection and growth, even as his body weakened, and inspired Kramer to share and teach the lessons he was learning from ALS about how to live as fully as possible, even in the midst of devastating grief.  It is a dignified, courageous, and unflinching look at how acceptance of loss and inevitable death can lead us all to a more meaningful and fulfilling life"

 At Peace outlines specific active and passive steps that older patients and their health care proxies can take to insure loved ones pass their last days comfortably at home and/or in hospice, when further aggressive care is inappropriate. Through Dr. Harrington's own experience with his parents and patients, he describes the terminal patterns of the six most common chronic diseases; how to recognize a terminal diagnosis even when the doctor is not clear about it; how to have the hard conversation about end-of-life wishes; how to minimize painful treatments; when to seek hospice care; and how to deal with dementia and other special issues. 

Norman Doidge's revolutionary new book shows, for the first time, how the amazing process of neuroplastic healing really works. It describes natural, non-invasive avenues into the brain provided by the forms of energy around us--light, sound, vibration, movement--which pass through our senses and our bodies to awaken the brain's own healing capacities without producing unpleasant side effects. And we learn how to vastly reduce the risk of dementia with simple approaches anyone can use.

Long Term Care:  How to Plan and Pay for It

The New Parkinson’s Disease Treatment Book

Brain Storms:  The Race to Unlock the Mysteries of Parkinson’s Disease

Always looking up: the adventures of an incurable optimist / Michael J. Fox.

No saints around here : a caregiver's days / Susan Allen Toth.

Dementia

Tea Cakes for Tosh

The Remember Balloons

James’s Grandpa has the best balloons because he has the best memories. He has balloons showing Dad when he was young and Grandma when they were married. Grandpa has balloons about camping and Aunt Nelle’s poor cow. Grandpa also has a silver balloon filled with the memory of a fishing trip he and James took together. 

Kitchigami Regional Library - Dementia Friendly Resources

When Someone You Love Has Dementia is a new kind of caregiving book. It's not about the usual techniques, but about how to manage on-going stress and grief. The book is for caregivers, family members, friends, neighbors as well as educators and professionals, anyone touched by the epidemic of dementia.  Boss's book builds on research and clinical experience, yet the material is presented as a conversation. She shows you a way to embrace rather than resist the ambiguity in your relationship with someone who has dementia.

Jolene Brackey has a vision. A vision that will soon look beyond the challenges of Alzheimer's disease and focus more of our energy on creating moments of joy. When a person has short-term memory loss, his life is made up of moments.  We are not able to create a perfectly wonderful day with someone who has dementia, but it is absolutely attainable to create a perfectly wonderful moment; a moment that puts a smile on their face, a twinkle in their eye, or triggers a memory.

A Caregiver s Guide to Dementia explores the use of activities and other techniques to prevent, reduce and manage the behavioral symptoms of dementia. Separate sections cover daily activities, effective communication, especially difficult behaviors, and explicit strategies to deal with agitation, repetitive questions, acting-out, wandering, restlessness, hoarding, and much more.  Worksheets are provided to help caregivers customize the strategies that work best for them.

Laura Wayman's program of care emphasizes communication, affirmative response, and empowerment―transforming the caregiving process from a burden into a fulfilling journey. Her true stories of caregiving illustrate the principles of this loving approach, giving readers essential tools for connecting with people who have dementia.

Wayman urges caregivers not to neglect themselves: take care of yourself so you will have physical and mental energy to share with your loved one.

Providing an accessible, question-and-answer-format primer on what touches so many lives, and yet so few of us understand, Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia: What Everyone Needs to Know contributes what is urgently missing from public knowledge: unsparing investigation of their causes and manifestations, and focus on the strengths possessed by people diagnosed.

In Making Tough Decisions about End-of-Life Care in Dementia, Dr. Anne Kenny, a skilled palliative care physician, describes how to navigate the difficult journey of late-stage dementia with sensitivity, compassion, and common sense. Combining her personal experience caring for a mother with dementia with her medical expertise in both dementia and end-of-life care, Dr. Kenny helps the reader prepare for a family member's death while managing their own emotional health.

Frontotemporal Degeneration (FTD) is now recognized as one of the most common forms of dementia in individuals under age 65, second only to Alzheimer's. Shedding light on a little known brain disease, this volume examines FTD from a few angles, beginning with the author's insightful memoir of her husband's struggle with FTD and its impact on their family.

In demystifying dementia, Dr. Powell helps us understand it with clearer eyes, from the point of view of both physician and caregiver. Ultimately, she wants us all to know that dementia is not only about loss--it's also about the preservation of dignity and hope.

Now called Amazing Place, serves over 3,000 individuals each year through its dementia day program, caregiver support programs and community education. The mission of enriching lives by providing fellowship, memory care and wellness to those with mild to moderate dementia and to support their families continues today.  Our participants show us that in spite of the losses they face, their souls remain intact. Their lives can still have meaning. They can still teach us. When labels are stripped away, as they inevitably are with dementia, we are able to see these people for who they really are. 

Edie Weinstein is a ninth grader at Visitation High School in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Edie wrote Grandpa and Lucy for a Girl Scout Silver Award Project to help more people, particularly youth, learn about dementia. She wanted to make it more enjoyable for young people to talk to their relatives or other older friends who have dementia.

This book outlines a program using ketone therapy and diet that is backed by decades of medical and clinical research and has proven successful in restoring mental function and improving both brain and overall health.The information in this book is useful not only for those who are suffering from neurodegenerative disease but for anyone who wants to be spared from ever encountering one or more of these devastating afflictions.

Reproducing the perfect meat loaf was no panacea, but it helped Witchel come to terms with her predicament, the growing phenomenon of “ambiguous loss ”— loss of a beloved one who lives on. Gradually she developed a deeper appreciation for all the ways the parent she was losing lived on in her, starting with the daily commandment “Tell me everything that happened today” that started a future reporter and writer on her way. And she was inspired to turn her experience into this frank, bittersweet, and surprisingly funny account that offers true balm for an increasingly familiar form of heartbreak.

Enter Mourning: A Memoir on Death, Dementia, and Coming Home chronicles Menzies’s transformative journey with her mother as words fail and the very nature of communication is redefined. Family dynamics among sisters and brothers come to the fore as the roles and responsibilities of the parent shift to the children: from moving their mother to a seniors` residence to signing a medical power of attorney to the matriarch`s physical decline, to her safe passage into death. Menzies and her siblings experience growing old--and growing up--in touching and heart-wrenching ways.

Dr. Mendelson begins his book with a straightforward explanation of how the brain ages―physically, structurally, and chemically.  The remainder of the book is prescriptive, and offers hope to both Alzheimer's patients and their caregivers by recommending scientifically tested herbs, vitamins and nutraceuticals that can help mitigate or delay the effects of dementia. Finally, the author suggests lifestyle changes that might help a person avoid dementia altogether, commonsense health tips that include steps to prevent heart disease and diabetes, treatment for sleep apnea, maintaining an ideal body weight, and even engaging in a more active social life.

Memory's Last Breath is Gerda Saunders' astonishing window into a life distorted by dementia. She writes about shopping trips cut short by unintentional shoplifting, car journeys derailed when she loses her bearings, and the embarrassment of forgetting what she has just said to a room of colleagues. Coping with the complications of losing short-term memory.

The book aims to present, educate and inform individuals about Alzheimer's disease in a comprehensive manner. Its scope ranges from the discovery of the disease, epidemiology and basic biological principles underlying it, to advanced stem cell therapies used in the treatment of Alzheimer's.

In Creative Care, Anne Basting lays the groundwork for a widespread transformation in our approach to elder care and uses compelling, touching stories to inspire and guide us all—family, friends, and health professionals—in how to connect and interact with those living with dementia

Perhaps someone in your family has been diagnosed with Alzheimer disease—or maybe you worry about developing memory loss yourself. In Is It Alzheimer's?, Dr. Peter V. Rabins, a top expert in the field, educates readers by answering 101 often-asked questions about memory loss and dementia. Written in a conversational, easy-to-use Q&A style, the book is organized into seven unique sections. A companion to the best-selling The 36-Hour Day, which Dr. Rabins coauthored

Grandma Forgets is the heart-warming story of a family bound by love as they cope with their grandma’s dementia. Over the years, the little girl has built up a treasure trove of memories of time spent with Grandma: sausages for Sunday lunch, driving in her sky-blue car to the beach, climbing her apple trees while she baked a delicious apple pie, and her comforting hugs during wild storms. But now, Grandma can’t remember those memories. That’s alright though, because she has her family to help her.

Everything you need to know to care for your loved one at home! You can do it! Our home care manual provides you with over 1200 excellent caregiving tips and suggestions to make your life easier. Written in a down-to-earth, non-clinical language, you will have no problem implementing the basic elements in your daily routine. Whether you are caring for a parent, spouse or residents in your home, this ready-reference guidebook will give you peace of mind in knowing that solutions are at your fingertips.

Through the Seasons includes an introduction with instructions for family and professional caregivers as well as a resources section at the end of the book.

An easy-to-follow, research-based guide to the simple, low-cost choices that give the reader the power to reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease and dementia; slow the progression of the disease; and mitigate symptoms and improve well-being.  These easy, low-cost, and fun brain-boosting activities can help you delay or even avoid the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, mitigating symptoms like forgetfulness or depression and sharpening your mental edge.

In the seventh edition of Mayo Clinic on Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias, expert neurologists from the Mayo Clinic organize this new research into a thorough and digestible guidebook that provides caregivers with the most up-to-date information regarding the disease. The book presents a comprehensive look at the typical symptoms associated with dementia, current findings regarding common causes of the disease, and gives essential tips for managing the day-to-day challenges of caring for someone with dementia.