The value of bringing your 'A game' to caregiving

If family caregivers for dementia patients become depressed, they may not be able to give their disease-stricken loved ones the full attention that they need. And this may even contribute to the patient’s earlier death. This, according to Robert Levenson, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “If you are not able to bring your A game to caregiving, the whole quality of caregiving might suffer. As caregivers get more depressed, their level of the stress sort of permeates the entire household. It might be almost contagious in a way that a virus would be contagious. But this would be a psychological virus." But there might be a different explanation for this dynamic, what Levenson calls - reverse causation. “And that is even if we measure depression many, many years before the death of the patients, it may be that if the patients destined to die early, they are already more difficult for caregivers to care for. So their decline may have been causing some of that depression.”