by Yanick Rice Lamb | Aug 15, 2017 | |
Publication No. 3 Creative Work: Media Production Title: Dealing With Dementia, November 2014 Principal Investigator: Lamb, Yanick Rice Published by TheRoot.com and the PBS site NextAvenue.org published the project as well as New America Media and FierceforBlackWomen.com, which ran a longer version. Lamb was a year-long John A. Hartford/MetLife Foundation Journalism in Aging & Health Fellow, a project of New America Media and the Gerontological Society of America. She was also an Alzheimer’s Disease Fellow through the National Press Foundation. Synopsis As the 2013 John A. Hartford/MetLife Foundation Journalism in Aging & Health Fellow, I spent a year researching Alzheimer’s disease, other forms of dementia and caregiving. Changes in the brain can cause dementia, severely impairing mental abilities including memory, movement, reasoning and thoughts. African-American women and men are two to three times more likely to develop dementia than white Americans. After extensively interviewing several people with dementia, caregivers and medical experts, I found the perfect family to profile right here in Washington — a single man caring for his 83-year-old mother. He was also a rarity. Only a third of caregivers are men, according to a study by the National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP. Men are less likely to be the main or only person in this role. They’re less likely to be involved with personal care and more likely to pay for it. In addition to presenting a different face of caregiving, this family helped to illustrated the commonalities that affect everyone as well as the unique attributes of African Americans, who are 65% more likely to be primary caregivers than other groups. Impact/Recognition New America Media, a coalition of 3,000 ethnic news organizations, provided oversight, peer review and editing...
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