Where this came from
Eight years of watching people be misread
I spent eight years working in care homes. In that time I watched people be sedated for behaviour that was not a symptom of anything except being placed in a building that did not suit them and cared for by people who had never been told who they were.
A resident kept her things out on every surface. Housekeeping tidied them away each morning because it looked untidy, and each morning she became distressed and was recorded as agitated. Nobody had ever asked why the objects were out. For a brain like hers, out of sight is genuinely gone. The tidying was not kindness. It was the daily removal of her memory.
Everything a care home needs in order to get this right, the person or their family already knows. We simply never ask, and when we do ask we write it on a form nobody opens again.
That is the whole idea. Ask properly, once. Record it in a way that is actually usable at four in the morning by an agency carer who has never met the person before. And let the person themselves write it, while they still can, in their own words rather than in a professional's summary of them.
Kerry Billson. Founder of ADHDementia, doctoral researcher in ADHD and dementia, and someone with ADHD herself.