Hey everybody, it's YeoA. So recently, I saw some alarming stats. Researchers estimate that 42% of

Americans will eventually develop a neurodegenerative disease. And who is caring for all those people?

Very often, it's family, people thrown into one of the hardest possible jobs with no training.

In our last episode, Brian can't stop fact-checking his mother-in-law.

I talked to this great researcher, Claudia Drossel.

Claudia is a psychology professor at Eastern Michigan University,

who works with people who have dementia and their caregivers to have a

nicer, easier time together. That episode was all about how hard it is to be a caregiver. But of course,

there's another person in the equation, the person with cognitive decline. And they have feelings,

too. Feelings that Claudia says are often misunderstood.

Like when someone with Alzheimer's gets upset about something that's not true, say, burglars

trying to get in through the back door, when in fact there are no burglars, Claudia says

it's easy to dismiss those feelings. But underneath their distress is

an underlying emotional need. It's the caregiver's job to figure out. It was an eye-opening

conversation. It felt like Claudia was teaching me how to puzzle through these personal

mysteries. It makes sense of clues that otherwise get ignored.

This is one of our bonus episodes.

They come out around once a month for our Patreon members,

and we're going to play you a preview of that conversation now.

To listen to the full episode,

you can go to patreon.com slash proxy podcast to become a member.

For $5 a month, you'll get access to ad-free episodes, our library of 11 bonus interviews and counting.

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