Start Here Situation Navigator Guides The Method Field Notes For Professionals About Just diagnosed? Read this first
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Dementia Steady

For the moments dementia care gets hard: what may be happening, what to say, and when to call. Written for the caregiver in the room right now, whether that is a husband at the kitchen table or an aide on the night shift.

Mission

Dementia Steady exists so that caregivers, family and professional, have a way through dementia's hardest moments.

Vision

A world where every caregiver can stay connected to the person in front of them, no matter how dementia changes them.

What this site is

Most of what gets handed to families after a diagnosis is either too clinical to absorb or too vague to be useful. Dementia Steady is an attempt to be neither: honest, specific, and written for the person sitting in the room right now, trying to figure out what comes next.

So it is organized around moments rather than topics. The Situation Navigator takes the situations that come up again and again, the refused shower, the accusation, the sudden confusion, the four in the morning, and for each one says what may be happening, what to say, what to try next and when to call a doctor, ending in a field card you can print for the refrigerator. Caregiver First Aid is for when you are the one who needs steadying before you walk back in. The guides, the course and the Field Notes carry the longer view, and all of it is free. Professional teams have their own training and assessment.

Underneath everything is one method. The Steadier Ground Method is three skills a caregiver can learn, Notice, Read and Reach, standing on one conviction: dementia changes what a person can do and does not change who they are. Every guide on this site starts from what the behavior is telling you, not how to stop it.

Licensed clinical and care professionals read the guidance pages, and how this site is reviewed says plainly what that does and does not mean.

Who is behind it

Dementia Steady is the work of Matt Field, a dementia care specialist who has worked inside dementia-specialized home care in the Chicago area since 2012, most of it training care staff across senior living communities and hundreds of first responders on how to actually be present with someone who has dementia, not just manage them.

He is also an ordained rabbi, with a decade of congregational experience accompanying aging communities and the families standing beside them. Dementia Steady is where those two halves meet: the clinical knowledge of what dementia actually does, stage by stage, paired with the pastoral sense of what a person needs to hear in the room when nothing about the moment feels manageable.

Dementia Steady is built independently by Matt, not on behalf of any organization or employer. Questions and corrections go to info@dementiasteady.com, and he reads that address.

Matt Field, dementia care specialist and ordained rabbi
Matt Field Dementia care specialist • Ordained rabbi • Caregiver educator

Not sure where to begin?

Start Here points you to the right place in a minute. If the diagnosis is new, the guide is written for the first weeks after it.

Start Here Read the guide