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Is it okay to lie to someone with dementia?
Nearly everyone doing this ends up doing it. Here is how caregivers think about it, and where most of them draw the line.
He asks where his mother is. She died in 1994.
You can tell him. He will hear it as news, because it is news, and he will grieve as though it happened this morning. Then in forty minutes he will ask again.
Or you can say she is running late. He settles, and you go and stand in the kitchen feeling like someone who lies to their own father.
Almost everybody ends up choosing the second one. Very few feel finished with the decision.
What telling the truth actually does
Most people try it first, and most try it more than once, because it feels like the decent thing.
What they describe is not a person being informed. It is a person being bereaved, in full, from the start, with no memory of the last four years of having already grieved it. And then again after lunch.
"I told him the truth twice. I watched my father find out his mother was dead twice. I will not do it a third time."
Answer the feeling, not the question
The move most people land on is not lying exactly. It is responding to what is underneath.
"Where is my mother" is usually not a request for information. It is I feel unmoored and I want the person who made me feel safe. So: she is not here right now, tell me about her, what was she like on a Sunday.
Caregivers report this works better than either the truth or a flat invented answer, because it gives him somewhere to go rather than a fact to accept.
The ones everybody uses
The car is at the shop. They are working on it. This is the standard answer to the keys, and it survives repetition because there is no detail in it to catch on.
The doctor said. An enormous amount of care runs on this one, for showers, for pills, for appointments. It works because the doctor still carries authority when nothing else does.
She is running late. Used for people who are not coming, in the broadest sense.
One caregiver keeps a note on the fridge of which version she used, because the worst outcome is not the lie, it is two different lies in a week.
Where people draw the line
This is where the room gets quite specific, and quite consistent.
Nobody defends lying to get compliance for the caregiver’s convenience rather than the person’s wellbeing. Nobody defends lying about money, or about what is being signed. And most people will not invent a future event they know will not happen, because the waiting afterwards is its own cruelty.
"I will tell him his brother is fine. I will not tell him his brother is visiting Saturday."
What it costs you
More than people expect, and the cost is worth naming because nobody warns you about it.
"My life has become one huge therapeutic lie. Feels like all I do is lie to her now." That is the sentence, more or less, that turns up whenever caregivers are honest about this.
It is not guilt about deceiving someone. It is the erosion of being straightforward with a person you have been straightforward with your whole life. That is a real loss and it deserves to be treated as one rather than argued away.
The reframe that helps some people
Not everybody finds this useful, but enough do that it is worth putting down.
A lie is something that takes advantage of someone by giving them a false picture of the world. What most caregivers are doing is closer to meeting somebody where they are standing, in a year they cannot leave, and not dragging them out of it several times a day to prove a point.
One person said it plainly: "I stopped calling it lying and started calling it not arguing, and I slept better."
If you are doing this and it sits badly with you, that is not a sign you are doing it wrong.
It is a sign you were raised to tell the truth, by someone who no longer recognizes it. Both of those things are allowed to be true at once.
Everything here is what worked for people doing this at home. It is not medical advice, and Kind Soup is not a medical or emergency service. If somebody is in danger, contact your local emergency number.
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- Sundowning: what actually helps at four in the afternoonShe is fine all day. Around four it starts. Here is what caregivers do about the hardest two hours of the day.