"I Want To Go Home.”

One of the questions families ask me most often is, "Why does Mum keep asking to go home when she is already there?"

Sometimes the person really is at home. It may be the very house they have lived in for the last forty years. They recognise the furniture, they have photographs on the walls and familiar possessions around them, yet they remain convinced this is not their home. They may become anxious, distressed or increasingly determined to leave.

It is difficult for families because the instinct is to explain the reality. "But Mum, you are home." Unfortunately, this rarely provides reassurance because the problem is not that the person has forgotten where they are.

They Aren't Being Difficult. They Are Living in a Different Time.

To understand why this happens, it helps to understand a little about how memory works.

Think of memory as a vast filing system built up over an entire lifetime. Older memories have been stored, revisited and strengthened thousands of times over many decades. More recent memories, however, rely heavily on a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which plays a key role in forming and retrieving new memories.

In many forms of dementia, particularly Alzheimer's disease, the hippocampus gradually shrinks and becomes less able to perform this function. Imagine a library where the shelves containing the oldest books remain largely intact, but the librarian responsible for cataloguing and retrieving all the newer books slowly disappears. The books are not necessarily gone, but finding them becomes increasingly difficult.

As the disease progresses, the brain relies more heavily on those older, deeply embedded memories because they remain the easiest to retrieve. The person is not deliberately choosing to live in the past. The brain simply has greater access to earlier chapters of life than it does to recent ones.

I often describe this as a train journey through life. Every person travels along the same railway line, but dementia causes them to step off at different stations. One person may arrive back in their fifties, another in their thirties, while someone else may find themselves in childhood. There is no predictable point at which this happens, and it is different for every individual.

Now imagine your mother has stepped off the train at twenty-one years of age. Think about what her life looked like then. Where was she living? Who were the important people? What mattered to her? That is the world her brain now recognises as current.

Looking at the situation in reverse can be equally helpful. Who had not yet entered her life? Perhaps she had not met your father. Perhaps she did not yet have children or grandchildren. Those relationships belonged to the future, not the twenty-one-year-old version of her life. It therefore becomes much easier to understand why she may not recognise you as her daughter, while still sensing that you are someone she knows and feels safe with.

Understanding this changes the question from, "Why is she saying this?" to, "Which chapter of her life is she living in today?"

So How Should Families Respond?

Once families understand that their loved one is living in a different chapter of their life, their approach naturally begins to change.

The first instinct is often to correct. We want to explain where they are, remind them of the facts or persuade them that they have become confused. Unfortunately, dementia is rarely persuaded by logic. If the brain can no longer access those recent memories, no amount of explanation can restore them.

This is why repeatedly saying, "You are at home," or "Mum died years ago," so often increases rather than reduces distress. Although you may know the information to be true, your loved one experiences it as completely new. Every time they hear that a parent has died, they experience the grief as though it has just happened. Minutes later, the memory of that conversation may have disappeared, leaving only the anxiety that prompted the question in the first place.

A more helpful approach is to respond to the emotion rather than the words. When someone says, "I want to go home," they are often expressing a need to feel safe, secure or connected with the people and places that make sense to them. They are not necessarily asking to travel to a particular address.

The same principle applies when someone repeatedly asks, "Where's Mum?"

If, in their reality, Mum is still alive, arguing otherwise serves little purpose. A gentle response such as, "Mum wanted you to stay safe with me for now. We'll see her a little later," often provides the reassurance they are seeking. The anxiety settles, not because they have been convinced, but because the emotional need behind the question has been met.

This approach is sometimes described as therapeutic lying, although many professionals now prefer the term therapeutic reassurance or therapeutic untruth. Whatever term is used, the principle remains the same. The intention is never to deceive for convenience. It is to prevent avoidable distress when a person no longer has the ability to understand or retain factual explanations.

Families sometimes feel guilty about responding in this way because it feels dishonest. I would encourage them to look at it differently. Good dementia care is not about winning an argument over the facts. It is about reducing fear, preserving dignity and helping the person feel safe.

The same principle applies to relationships. If your wife believes you are an old friend, or your husband thinks you are his sister, there is rarely any benefit in insisting on your true identity if doing so causes confusion or distress. People living with dementia often lose factual memories long before they lose emotional ones. They may no longer remember your name or understand your relationship, but they frequently retain the feeling that you are someone they trust. That emotional connection is far more important than factual accuracy.

Perhaps the most valuable question families can ask themselves is not, "How do I bring Mum back into my reality?" but, "How can I make her reality feel safe?" That small change in thinking often transforms conversations that previously ended in frustration into moments of reassurance, connection and calm