The 36-Hour Day: A Family Guide to Caring for People with Alzheimer Disease, Other Dementias, and Memory Loss
Nancy L. Mace and Peter V. Rabins · 2021
The 36-Hour Day (2021) is a book by Nancy L. Mace and Peter V. Rabins on Caregiving & Dementia. A practical guide for families caring for someone with Alzheimer disease or another dementia, how the illness actually behaves, how to manage daily life and difficult behaviors, and how to keep yourself intact.
The book that turned dementia caregiving from private bewilderment into a set of learnable, humane skills, and insisted the caregiver's own survival is part of the treatment plan.
Two of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of The 36-Hour Day pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.
- The title is the diagnosis of the caregiver's life: when someone needs supervision around the clock, a 24-hour day stretches to feel like 36, and every strategy in the book exists to buy back hours.
- "Dementia" is a symptom, not a disease. A proper evaluation must separate Alzheimer disease from vascular dementia, Lewy body dementia, frontotemporal disorders, and from potentially reversible mimics like delirium, drug interactions, thyroid disease, B12 deficiency, or depression.
The other 5 — and the full 11-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 9 chapters
The whole summary runs about 11 minutes, read or listened to.
- What Is Dementia?
- Getting Help, and Getting the Right Evaluation
- Problems in Independent Living
- Problems in Caregiving: The Daily Tasks
- Catastrophic Reactions and the Meaning of Behavior
- Wandering, Sundowning, Suspicion, and Hallucinations
- Mood, Personality, and What the Person Still Feels
- Getting Outside Help and the Care Decisions Ahead
- Caring for Yourself: The Second Patient
Finish The 36-Hour Day tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 11 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
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