The one thing caregivers need most (#98)

My mom was seven years old when her grandmother Josephine took her own life. I wouldn’t have known but mom told me the story once, while going over some family history files. She told me how Josephine had been a caregiver all her life and one day felt so stuck, so overwhelmed and alone, she made a terrible choice.

Caregivers often feel stuck. Even when they’re surrounded with gadgets and resources that visit and assess and provide bits of support, they can feel overwhelmed and isolated. Why is that?

In one of my favorite TED Talks, Hillary Cottam tells the story of how providing disjointed, expensive interventions to stuck caregivers fails to improve their outcomes or make them any less stuck. What worked? Building meaningful relationships with them.

We can’t fix everything. But we can do something. As my readers know, these are my personal mottos:

Start where you are. Make one thing better.

So what’s one thing, the most important thing, we can give to the 44 million caregivers in the US?

It’s relationship, what Hillary Cottam calls enthusiastic relationship.

"We need to bring people and their communities back into the heart of the way we design new systems and new services," she says.

How can we build supportive, enthusiastic relationships between those in need and those that provide help? It’s the one thing caregivers need most. Which means the sites, services and systems that focus on this will be the ones that have the most success, and the greatest impact on caregivers’ lives.