Naomi Feil an academic who grew up in a care home where her father worked with dementia patients has come up with a therapy called “Validation Therapy”. It aims to ease the distress and frustration caused when forgetful patients are corrected and contradicted by well meaning carers and family. The therapy means putting yourself in the other persons reality rather than trying to bring them in to yours. The dementia patients become very distressed and anxious when they are being confronted and contradicted. Sylvia Dunn who is a service manager for an age UK project said, by going along with what a dementia patient says you can open up a more important conversation.

Naomi Feil, was born in Munich in 1932, and grew up in the Montefiore Home for the Aged in Cleveland Ohio, where her father was the administrator and her mother, the head of the Social Service Department. After graduating with a Masters degree in Social Work from Columbia University in New York, she began working with the elderly. Between 1963 and 1980 Mrs. Feil developed Validation as a response to her dissatisfaction with traditional methods of working with the severely disoriented old people who were her clients.