Maria Shriver on Alzheimer’s and Women: Hope Over Fear
Try to remember what you were doing a minute ago. Got it? Now wrap your brains around this: In the past minute, another American developed a fatal disease that will slowly erase the personality and a lifetime of memories. That person will either die with that disease or from it, because there is no cure. That disease is Alzheimer’s, and it’s a growing national epidemic.
Right now, Alzheimer’s disease is like an earthquake rumbling deep in the core of our society, and women are at its epicenter. Women are fully two-thirds of the people with Alzheimer’s. They are also 60 percent of the unpaid caregivers of loved ones who have it. In every way, Alzheimer’s is a mind-blowing disease -- not just for the people who get it, but for everyone around them.
Believe me, I know. When my father, Sargent Shriver, was diagnosed back in 2003, my mother, four brothers and I all felt we were entering a world that was confusing, dark and depressing. People just didn’t talk about Alzheimer’s when it hit their families. It was a diagnosis shrouded in shame, and there was little information and even less hope. That’s why today, I’m passionate about defeating it.
So on October 15th, I released The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Takes Alzheimer’s, a groundbreaking effort produced in collaboration with the Alzheimer’s Association. It’s a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary snapshot of women as caregivers, breadwinners and people living with this disease. This is a follow-up to last year’s Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything, which looked at the transformational change that has overtaken our country as women have become about half of all US workers, while still being our primary caregivers. We found that the way we are in America has changed, now that two-thirds of mothers are primary or co-breadwinners. Husbands and wives reported that they now regularly negotiate their schedules and their joint responsibilities. We saw that attitudes and behaviors are evolving, but our institutions have not kept up.
This year we’ve focused our Shriver Report on the Alzheimer’s epidemic as another tipping-point issue for