Education is empowering for a person coping with caring for someone with Alzheimer’s disease or other types of dementia.

That’s the idea behind Dementia: A Caregiver’s Guide, a book published last month by Baycrest Health Sciences.

Geared to professional caregivers or family members caring for a relative, the book lays out strategies for dealing with 21 day-to-day health and lifestyle challenges often faced by people with dementia, and offers practical tips for preventing and managing them.

Dementia was co-written by Bianca Stern, executive director of culture, arts and innovation at Baycrest, and Nira Rittenberg, an occupational therapist with the Baycrest Geriatric Psychiatry Community Service, and was reviewed by about 20 health-care professionals at Baycrest.

“This is a very difficult disease and a long journey… We try to make [caregivers] their own navigators, to be able to cope [with these issues] in the day to day,” said Rittenberg, who also runs support groups for adults caring for a parent with dementia.

She stressed that the guidebook can’t be taken as “a cookie cutter formula,” but rather a starting point from which caregivers can mould an approach that works for them.

Dementia is an expanded and re-named third edition of a resource initially published by Baycrest in 1999 called Caring For Your Loved One.

The new version includes sections on communication, eating, bathing, dressing and grooming, sex and intimacy, nourishing the spirit and navigating the care system, as well as three additional chapters, on travelling, sleep, and mouth and dental care.

There’s sufficient research about dementia online that someone could spend “morning to night reading about it,” Rittenberg said, but the Baycrest handbook is meant to be unique in that it tries to avoid inundating readers with information and scientific facts.

Instead, the book includes some basic facts about dementia – all of it sound and evidence-based, Rittenberg emphasized – but hones in on concrete strategies for dealing with specific issues.

The chapter on safety and the home environment, for example, encompasses several sub-sections on ways to achieve home safety, such as avoiding too much change in the home, concrete tips for making the person’s home safer and less stressful, and ways to prevent accidents.

In addition to updating content according to new best-practice standards for dementia management, Rittenberg explained, the caregiver handbook’s latest iteration has modified certain elements that felt outdated, starting with the book’s name.

“We got a lot of pushback from the former title, Caring For Your Loved One, because people said it doesn’t recognize that someone might be caring for a person they don’t love. And it’s true, people care for others for different reasons –[such as] out of respect or because they have to. So we wanted to take away that piece of judgment around it,” Rittenberg said.

The new edition also reflects the ways the approach to caregiving has changed in recent years

This includes both a greater understanding of how important the quality of care is to a dementia sufferer’s physical and mental health, as well as recognition of the impact caregiving can have on the person administering it.

The book, therefore, has a section devoted to self-care for caregivers, and Rittenberg said she and Stern were careful to use language that is neither dictatorial nor preachy, to help caregivers navigate options without taking on undue stress.

People caring for relatives with dementia are often adult children sandwiched between caring for a sick parent while raising a family, she added, making the disease something of “a family illness.”

Factors like this can make caregivers susceptible to mental health issues such as depression or anxiety.

“When I’m caring for a client [as an occupational therapist], their caregiver is as much my client as the person with dementia,” she said.

The guidebook is being sold for $27.99 on the Baycrest website and in its gift shop, and Rittenberg said the ultimate goal is to also make it into a downloadable e-book.