Our youth, our compass: families walking with younger‐onset dementia shine light on stigma
Diana Shulla Cose, Stephanie Fitzgerald, Patti LaFleur, Bree Ruge · 2025
Read Our youth, our compass: families walking with younger‐onset dementia shine light on stigma by Diana Shulla Cose, Stephanie Fitzgerald, Patti LaFleur, Bree Ruge (2025) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-11712167.txt.
Description
Shulla Cose, Fitzgerald, LaFleur, and Ruge give voice to young people whose parents developed dementia early in life. Writing in 2025, the authors describe these youth as the softest voices on the hardest road. Their project, run through a community called Lorenzo's House, teaches a three-step model for meeting stigma: recognize it, respond to it, and let the exchange empower both sides.
At an international youth summit, nearly one hundred young people shared stories of stigma at parties, shops, parks, and hospitals. The model gave them tools to answer with teaching rather than fight, flight, or freeze. The group expects more than two hundred youth at its next summit. The piece is a community report, not a clinical study.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Diana Shulla Cose, Stephanie Fitzgerald, Patti LaFleur, Bree Ruge |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2025 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 2 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |