Emotions and Care for People with Alzheimer’s Disease

Abstract

This article examines the link between the care of people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and the emotions of family caregivers, based on a survey carried out from 2018 to 2022, in which health professionals dedicated to dementia and 17 family caregivers were interviewed. For this article, we selected interviews with daughters who take care of their mothers or fathers in the process of dementia due to AD. We reflect on the meanings of care, responsibilities, and obligations in the public and private spheres. Family care is addressed as the main instance responsible for caring for the elderly and their emotional impacts. In this sense, the interviews selected for this article present particularities of care since most of them work besides being caregivers and experience emotional tensions resulting from these different roles. Finally, we analyzed the rhetoric around the feelings present in the care relationship: the gratitude and those considered as negative feelings.