Educational support to a family with a member suffering from Alzheimer's disease

Abstract

With the development of neoliberal capitalism, all services have been put on the market and became commodified, and the main ideal became the ideal of the greatest possible profit. Such changes influenced adult education, which became market-oriented. The privatization and comodification of services, as well as the change of the paradigm from care for the community to care for the individual, affects social categories that require socially organized help to meet their basic needs. Social services have became less and less accessible to them. In the neoliberal system, the old are marginalized, and dysfunctional olds get extra archeons. This is the case with old people who suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, which is one of the most common causes of dementia syndrome and it gradually makes person dependent on someone else’s care and help. This disease affects the functioning of the entire family of a diseased member, it puts family in a state of social need and can generate a non-developmental family crisis. Due to the multiple negative effects caused by this crisis, various services and support programs for families with a demented member are developing. One type of these support programs is adult education. However, these educational programs are very rare, since they are not attractive to the market. Considering the global trend of increasing number of people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, we recognize the need to make adult education more accessible to families of diseased. Such need arises from the perspective of human rights and community care, but it can also be explained in economic terms. It is, therefore, necessary that such programs are systematically available to families of demented, and we decided to investigate what should be the content of these educational programs. Our research question is: what are the educational contents that are useful for Alzheimer’s family members in this crisis situation? In the search for an answer, we used a qualitative paradigm and a descriptive, non-experimental method. Given that we are starting from the assumption that the process of creating educational content should be participatory, that all actors involved in the life of a diseased member’s family should be included in it, research participants are members of demented person’s family, social care specialists and caregivers. We conducted a deep, semi-structured interview with them, and we searched for the similarities and differences in their opinions, in order to reach what is common. Our goal was to reach a compromise in the participants’ thinking, to reach the “compromising content” of educational programs for the family of the demented. The research results show that the opinions of the research participants are very similar, they have more in common in their opinions than differences. Everyone agrees that members of the family of demented need both the content about the illness itself, as well as the content related to family functioning and community services. This suggests that relatives of the demented need a comprehensive education that will support them in various aspects of their lives.