Plain Interior Design Helps Calm Alzheimer’s Patients
Alzheimer’s patients sometimes mistake their shadows for pools of water and try to jump over them. Sometimes, they mistake their shadows for holes in the ground and freeze, terrified of falling into an abyss.
To help avoid that kind of confusion, nursing homes should stick to the plain and simple, with a minimum of decoration, in housing Alzheimer’s victims, a neurologist and an interior designer say. Their advice goes against the trend in many nursing homes toward lamps, mirrors, lively colors and shiny floors.
Managers of the Levelland Nursing Home say patients in the Alzheimer’s wing have been calmer and need less medication since Texas Tech neurologist J. Thomas Hutton and design professor JoAnn Shroyer redecorated the interior.
“I don’t know if we can say they’re less confused, but we have simplified their environment. Their living spaces are almost sterile,” Shroyer said. “There are no pictures, and the wall coverings don’t have any patterns. The furniture is very simple, and there are no lamps.”
Mirrors, television sets and radios do not have a place in the wing, either, because they create too much confusion, Hutton said. “These people misperceive their environment.”
About 4 million older Americans suffer from Alzheimer’s disease. No one knows the cause and there is no cure for the disorder marked by dementia--an inability to remember, reason or understand what is going on. Because it is a progressive disease, many patients can live at home under the care of family or nurses. Hutton and Shroyer’s research focuses on patients whose conditions have worsened to the point where they must be institutionalized.
In addition to mistaking shadows for puddles or holes, Alzheimer’s patients have been known to try to pick the flowers in floral-print wallpaper, to sit on the floor and try to gather the “pebbles” they see in terrazzo linoleum, to believe that gunfire in TV shows is directed at them, and to be threatened by the person in the mirror who doesn’t respond to their greeting.
The researchers hope to use their six years of study and their experiments at Levelland, about 30 miles from Lubbock, to write guidelines for other homes to increase the safety and comfort of Alzheimer’s patients.
Part of Hutton’s research involves tracking the eyes of Alzheimer’s patients as they look at photographs and describe what is happening. “What we found was they tended to be distracted from relevant parts of the picture,” he said. “They had the inability to suppress the irrelevant and focus on the parts they should pay attention to.”
Alzheimer’s patients sometimes have trouble eating because they are distracted by place mats, silverware and napkins--so much so that they barely notice the food, he said.
Hutton used his research to create a videotape in which the viewer sees a nursing home the way an Alzheimer’s patient might. The camera is drawn toward house plants and toward the listener, instead of the speaker, in a conversation involving two people. Exit signs and clocks go unnoticed: One symptom of the disease is that sufferers find it difficult to cast their eyes upward.
At the end of the 10-minute vignette, the elderly man playing an Alzheimer’s patient looks in a mirror, shouts, “Who are you?” and throws a tantrum when the image won’t answer.
