That’s awful. I’m so sorry you both had to endure that. Anyone trained properly in memory care knows to not correct people precisely because of how much needless distress it causes the patient.

I know people who work in long term care and anyone who continually corrects someone with dementia (or similar) to bring them back to reality, is cruel. Simply put, they don’t remember, and they won’t remember the reminder; so what happens is that they get sad and depressed over it, forget it happened, then they don’t understand why they feel sad/depressed. It’s mean, and serves no useful purpose.

IDK what’s wrong with people, where they need to tell everyone how wrong they are all the time. Like, give it a break. You don’t have to prove that you know things, and you don’t need to prove that someone is wrong to demonstrate your big brain. If someone is wrong, let them be wrong. Why do you care so much about it? If they’re happy in their incorrect thoughts, and they’re not harming anyone by being wrong, then it doesn’t matter. Just let them think what they want.

For anyone in a LTC facility, it’s disgraceful and downright unprofessional at best… I’d call it psychological torture, which is probably more correct.

I agree. With my mom, I only corrected her when it felt wrong not to. Like when I went to check on her wearing just pajama pants and she thought I was my dad - I wasn’t up to playing along with her being flirty, but even then I just said “Hey mom, how are you doing?” Otherwise, just letting her be happy seemed best.

Yeah. I only ever corrected her when she asked a direct specific question. In that case, I’m pretty sure she was having a lucid moment and wanted some confirmation.

Every other time, I just let it pass.

Her real question was usually “Is someone looking out for him sufficiently, since I can’t right now?” And the answer to that was “Yes. You don’t need to worry about him.” Which is roughly what I tended to say.

(I look like him, so I got this question more often than most.)