Dasha Kiper on Dementia and the Role of the Caregiver

After getting a master’s degree in clinical psychology, Dasha Kiper became the live-in caregiver for a Holocaust survivor with Alzheimer’s disease. For a year, she endured the emotional strain of looking after a person whose condition disrupts the rules of time, order, and continuity. Inspired by her own experience and her work counseling caregivers in the subsequent decade, Kiper offers an entirely new way to understand the symbiotic relationship between patients and those tending to them. Her book is the first to examine how the workings of the “healthy” brain prevent us from adapting to and truly understanding the cognitively impaired one.

Dasha Kiper talks about dementia and the role of the caregiver in her book, Travelers to Unimaginable Lands: Stories of Dementia, the Caregiver, and the Human Brain.

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Dasha Kiper is the former consulting clinical director of support groups at an Alzheimer’s organization and has an MA in clinical psychology from Columbia University. She has worked with both dementia patients and caregivers.

Roxanne Coady is owner of R.J. Julia, one of the leading independent booksellers in the United States, which—since 1990—has been a community resource not only for books, but for the exchange of ideas. In 1998, Coady founded Read To Grow, which provides books for newborns and children and encourages parents to read to their children from birth. RTG has distributed over 1.5 million books.