To the Editor:
Re “When My Father Got Alzheimer’s, I Had to Learn to Lie to Him,” by Sandeep Jauhar (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, April 7):
Dr. Jauhar shares a valuable lesson that can benefit many dementia caregivers while showing love and compassion to individuals affected by Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.
Not sharing absolute truths with a family member living with dementia is not about deception. It’s about finding ways to connect that makes sense to the person while keeping them safe, secure and comfortable.
Being honest and truthful is the recommended first course of action, but when statements are upsetting, agitating or confusing a person with the disease, caregivers may want to consider another approach.
Caregivers should be flexible and find ways to communicate with the person that makes sense to them. Interactions should emphasize connection, not correction. Meeting the person with Alzheimer’s where they are in the moment is the most compassionate thing a caregiver can do.
Beth Kallmyer
Chicago
The writer is vice president for care and support at the Alzheimer’s Association.
To the Editor:
My mother, who has dementia, hasn’t been told that my brother died more than four years ago. At first, it seemed to me like a violation of her human dignity not to inform her that her son had died. However, she has no short-term memory left, so she would need to be retold — and re-traumatized — repeatedly. It might have been a violation of her dignity to tell her.
Dementia teaches hard lessons. As children we are told not to lie. For children of dementia patients, a more complicated moral calculus emerges. To tell my mother of my brother’s death would have been to impose my own assumptions and needs on her, heedless of the world she now inhabits.
A therapist who works with the families of dementia patients remarked to me that we don’t know what it is like “over there.” Since we don’t, we should hesitate before pushing the norms of “over here”— however well intentioned. We risk serving our own needs more than helping the dementia patient.
Occasionally, we suspect that my mother knows my brother is gone. Other times, she thinks he’s on a golf vacation or taking care of her house for her. She won’t return to that house, but if she can occasionally think my brother is there, waiting for her, it isn’t the worst thing.
Sara Murphy
New York
To the Editor:
Unlike Sandeep Jauhar, when my mother began showing signs of dementia, I already knew how to lie. It was my mother who, early in my life, taught me the importance of not hurting feelings, of protecting dignity, by not telling the whole truth. She called it white lying.
For two years, I was her chief caregiver as she battled dementia. Over and over I reached into my caregiving toolbox and pulled out white lies when needed. She would never know she had given me such an important tool in caring for her.
Kathy Wouk
New York
Use Diplomacy to End the Nuclear Arms Race
To the Editor:
Re “A 3-Way Nuclear Rivalry Upends U.S. Strategy” (front page, April 20):
China’s decision to grow its nuclear weapons arsenal to be on a par with or potentially more advanced than that of the U.S. could not be worse news. I fear that the danger of an intentional or inadvertent launch of global nuclear war will soon be greater than it was when the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 put us on the brink of a nuclear apocalypse.
In more bad news, the war in Ukraine has led a desperate, reckless Vladimir Putin to unilaterally suspend the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, our last functional nuclear control treaty.
The world already has an estimated 13,000 nuclear warheads, though just a few dozen detonations of thermonuclear weapons could end the ability of the planet to sustain human life. Our hope now is that intense, mutually respectful diplomacy will succeed in bringing sanity to the negotiating table.
During the late 1970s and ’80s I was a member of a physicians’ antinuclear organization that rallied around this singular message: If we have a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, no matter how it starts, there will be no possibility of a medical response.
Our “prescription” was that prevention, meaning diplomacy, was the only strategy that could save us from nuclear annihilation. Consider that prescription officially refilled.
Irwin Redlener
New York
The writer, a pediatrician, is founding director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University.
Unity, Civility and the Decline of Old Social Media
To the Editor:
Re “Social Media as We Knew It Is Long Gone,” by Brian X. Chen (Tech Fix, front page, April 20):
The shift from large social media sites to smaller, more specialized networks is another blow to the nation’s deteriorating sense of national unity. Patriotism and belief in the best attributes of the core American project have declined sharply in recent years, particularly among the young.
With the further fragmentation of people’s social and political identities and the reduction in the number of platforms that bring people together for national events — happy and tragic — the belief in a common national purpose and quintessential patriotism founded on pluralism, diversity and can-do American exceptionalism are bound to decline.
It would be another body blow to the patriotic vision that for so long made this country that “shining city on a hill” admired the world over.
Richard M. Perloff
Cleveland
The writer, a professor of communication and political science at Cleveland State University, is the author of “The Dynamics of Political Communication.”
To the Editor:
“Social Media as We Knew It Is Long Gone” notes that Twitter “automatically responds to press inquiries with a poop emoji.” That is alarming.
Many decades ago I taught 42 second-grade students in a Northern California school. Every one of them knew better than to make toilet jokes in public. Apparently the “bro” culture (encouraged by Elon Musk) missed that message.
Or perhaps that culture and those influencers just don’t care for social niceties? Down with ideas; up with shock jocks. Bad news for public social discourse in the future.
Judith Koll Healey
Minneapolis
Personalized Search
To the Editor:
In “Google’s Fight to Stay Ahead of Bing’s A.I.” (front page, April 17), the new search engine being developed is described as offering users results tailored specifically to each individual’s needs.
I worry that this race toward ever increasing personalization of results may exacerbate existing polarization and eventually lead to users’ receiving only content that affirms their existing perspectives.
While the winner of this hyper-personalization race may gain more users, the cost to societal cohesion could render us all losers in the end.
Ethan Annis
Oakland, Calif.
