Abstract
To examine what dementia people who have difficulty doing things on their own in their daily life think in interaction with their family caregivers, how they view themselves as patients in constant need of nursing care, and in what way they develop relationships with their family caregivers, we held semi-structured interviews with nine patients with mild to moderate dementia, and analyzed the interviews on the basis of the modified grounded theory approach. Demented patients with an awareness of their "collapsing self-conception" were trying to nurture a new relationship with their caregivers, while maintaining a good balance between two conflicting feelings of "making the best of themselves" and "making concessions". To strike the balance, they needed to keenly feel that they "were allowed to stay alive by the support of medical professionals and family caregivers". Making concessions often left the patients with frustration or complaints, and repeated concessions started to cause them to enhance their "resistance to concessions," which was thought to result from emotional disturbance. When "resistance to concessions," "feeling a sense of helplessness at the mercy of their disease," and "giving up finding what they can do" came together in the patients, it isolated them mentally and made it difficult for them to establish relationships with people around them.
