Why do dementia patients say “I want to go home?”

I saw a post from Bob DeMarco. He has a podcast called Alzheimer’s Reading Room.

It’s very good.

And he posted there about dementia patients wanting to go home.

Why do they want to go home?

Their long-term memory is intact and their short-term memory is gone.

They want to go back to their comfort zone. At the time of their comfort.

Their time of comfort was when they were young.

I’m Filipino, I grew up in the Philippines and my comfort is in the Philippines.

Even if I live comfortably here in the US, still, at the back of my head, my comfort is still where I came from.

My wife, sometimes she gets homesick.

That’s what our dementia patients feel. They want to go back to their place of comfort.

It’s because their long-term memory is intact. It’s like a filing cabinet. When you get dementia, you lose the later years.  What’s left is the later years.

So that’s why dementia patients always say that they want to go home.