Keeping people with dementia separated and secured is a common practice, based on the reasonable idea of safety first for the vulnerable. During this pandemic, however, contact with those in care homes, many of whom have dementia, was cut off at great cost to residents’ mental and physical health.
Isolation and segregation create and reinforce another kind of barrier to those with dementia: that of stigma, which can rob people of quality of life, personal agency and the dignity of risk the rest of the population expects as a birthright….
