[www.theatlantic.com]

Quote

The Dutch Village Where Everyone Has Dementia

To put it into perspective, a private room at a U.S. nursing home cost an average of $248 per day in 2012, or more than $90,500 annually—a figure that’s even more staggering when applied to the rapid increase in dementia patients globally. By 2030, the number of people suffering from dementia around the world is expected to hit 76 million, which some estimate will cause an 85 percent increase in dementia-related healthcare costs worldwide. By 2050, the U.S. alone will pay a projected $1.2 trillion.

In traditional nursing homes, with their clinical appearance, the situation is openly communicated to residents—you’re sick, you can’t take care of yourself, you’re forgetting things again. But in Hogewey, the residents live in a place that looks and feels like home, even though it’s not; what others know to be a façade, they see as reality, which may help them to feel normal even in the midst of their disease. Psychologist Donald Spence defines the concept of “narrative reality” as the ways in which stories and places help link the “true” world to one that a person is better able to understand, using storytelling as a vehicle to understand the truth—you’re in a place that’s holistically normal, you’re not lost, etc.

What is described is more analogous to an assisted living facility than a nursing home. In nursing homes most of the residents are wheelchair bound and don't know how to even get back to their own rooms from the various activity rooms - and most of them are incontinent.

An open air 'Truman show' town atmosphere would be more frightening and more dangerous for all but beginning stage real dementia patients than nursing homes are. These people are all in their own world anyway so don't need a home town staging as they create their own delusional story of where they are and who is who.

In the "grande" dining room at the table in the nursing home my mother is in now only one person knows she is in a nursing home. My mother thinks she is dining in a cruise ship dining hall, another woman thinks she is in her University dining room, etc. They think their rooms are in a different building without them having to be that way anyway.

Everybody there also has an equally fabricated romanticized story of their life, etc. They are very creative at inventing ways to have their situations make sense to them and are happy that way as long as everyone goes along with their sagas - which is way easier and cheaper to do than building a town for them.

This article is a fantasy story for people who have no experience about things such as nursing home bound dementia patients yet. Those are the only people who will think it's a good idea or even real.