How Caregivers Can Help Other Caregivers During the Pandemic

Lois was grateful for the calls she received from her neighbors, church members and the hospital care managers to see how she was managing with her husband with dementia now that they were sheltering in place in their small apartment. But it also bothered her a little. She knew everyone was trying to be helpful, but she didn't always want help. It didn't feel good to be on the receiving end of care all the time because others assumed, since she was a dementia caregiver, she needed their concern.

Her children and grandchildren knew better. To them, Lois was the opinionated, commanding lady who was most comfortable telling them and others what to do. At 76, she had spent a lifetime running small businesses and community organizations and still regarded herself as supremely capable. If anything, she wanted to give care during the national crisis, not receive it. That's what most appealed to her sense of self-importance and made her feel best.

It's a long-observed truism that people engaged in family caregiving often don't identify themselves as family caregivers, and even if they do, they shrink from accepting assistance from anyone else. Receiving help can trigger guilt in a family caregiver, as if they are somehow shirking duties that are theirs and theirs alone. To help these family caregivers, it turns out that a paradoxical approach other clinicians and I have used works: Don't offer to help, but ask them for help instead.

The potential benefits of this approach are supported by the research of Stephanie L. Brown, a social psychologist at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, who studies the impact of being altruistic. The gist of her findings: Helping others can enhance our health. In a 2018 research article, she and her colleagues found that family caregiving, a form of altruism, has a “stress-buffering” effect that may decrease caregivers’ negative health consequences from the caregiving they do and actually allow them to live longer.

For those caregivers who have a driving need to help others, the current pandemic may in fact prove to be an opportunity, not just a threat and a hardship. With that in mind, how can we help caregivers find meaningful ways to give more care, especially to other family caregivers, during this time? Here are some ideas:

Create check-in call trees

Checking in on the status of a caregiver is usually a one-way process: I call you weekly or monthly to see how you're doing. You say fine. I hang up the phone, feeling self-satisfied. But you might hang up feeling anywhere from warmly heartened to mildly irritated, depending on your personality and needs. A better, more interdependent system might be to set up a phone tree in which neighbors, family members or family caregivers have preassigned roles to call one another regularly to check in. This is a multi-way, communal process: I call you, you call the next person on the list, and so forth. No one hogs the glory of being the “helper,” and no one feels the unwanted spotlight of being the “helped.” Everyone stays in touch to help one another. All feel uplifted.