Validation Therapy Case Study Dementia

K.G. is a single seventy-six-year-old First Nations male living with dementia and he has a history of alcohol abuse. K.G. has been living at Central City Lodge for eight years now. K.G. has a significant impairment of remote and recent memories. He has cognitive deficits in the ability to think abstractly and alterations in his language ability (aphasia). K.G. has poor judgement and a lack of insight into his illness. Currently K.G. has no persecutory delusions or any sensory perceptual disturbances. K.G. spends the majority of his time in his room and is socially withdrawn from staff and co-residents. The client has an unsteady gait and requires a cane for support and mobility.
Validation therapy can be used to focus on K.G.’s emotions and subjective reality. The benefits of validation therapy for K.G. is to restore his self-worth, less withdrawal from the outside world, communicate and interact with other people, and reduce stress and anxiety (Austin & Boyd, 2010). Using validation therapy, the psychiatric nurse does not try to reorient the patient, but rather respects the individual’s sense of reality.
Person-centered care is applying the values and principles of humanistic psychotherapy to dementia with an emphasis on genuineness, unconditional positive regard and emphatic understanding (Hill et al., 2010). As a psychiatric nurse, it is important to assist the client living with dementia to identify his or her strengths, develop a sense of self or self-actualization, and recognize the limits of his or her capacity.
Art Therapy. Art therapy can provide people who have dementia with a meaningful stimulation and improve their ability to interact with other people by expressing themselves physically and emotionally (Adams, 2008). K.G. said he likes to draw or paint pictures when he was younger. This is beneficial for K.G. as art therapy may be used as a means of providing self-awareness and reduces