On August 13, a brand new town in the suburbs of San Diego (California) welcomed its first residents. Pictured by Le Figaro, its shopping center nicknamed “Town Square” is far from ordinary. Over more than 800 m2, a setting of an imaginary 1950s American city was installed by George G. Glenner Alzheimer’s Family Center Adult Day Centers. Unlike the usual shops and restaurants, Town Square sells an intangible good: souvenirs.
reminiscence therapy
The goal? Stimulate the memory of people with Alzheimer’s disease. Through this reconstructed decor, they are invited to find buried memories. This is called reminiscence therapy. Caregivers indeed encourage patients suffering from dementia and cognitive impairments to talk about events from the past with the help of photos, music and stimulating messages. Reminiscence therapy would thus, according to a study by the Cochrane organizationpositive effects on mood, cognition or communication.
The therapy also targets memories made between 10 and 30 years old, as they would be the strongest and most durable. Knowing that the majority of people suffering from this neurodegenerative disease and other related diseases are octogenarians, the choice of the 1950s makes sense: a person aged 80 in 2018 was 12 in 1950. Town Square thus has a rotary telephone, a 1959 Ford, a jukebox or even portraits of Hollywood stars of the time. All the details have been thought out so that the environment is known and reassuring for the participants.
Alternative care
Every day, medical patients are sent for treatment in this fake city with fourteen storefronts, including a restaurant, a cinema, a pet store, a gas station… They circulate in small groups with an assistant and visit five or six storefronts a day. , pretexts for activities adapted to each one. They thus watch period films, create puzzles in the library or benefit from animal therapy.
Demand is strong, so much so that a 2.0 version of this reconstruction is under construction near Baltimore, still in the United States. In France, the opening of a first “Alzheimer’s village” will open its doors at the end of 2019 in Dax (Landes). There too, it will be a question of accompanying the patients with non-drug approaches and therapeutic activities, in a familiar environment.
Read also :
Alzheimer’s disease: 20 additional cognitive-behavioral units
