HELPING HAND FOR APHASIA
Support group spreads word on disorder
Lori Buchanan was cycling around England a few years ago when she saw a sign on a hotel door that said the establishment was aphasia friendly.
Buchanan, whose brother suffered a stroke when he was 30 and could no longer talk, was intrigued and asked an employee what the sign meant. He didn’t know but got the hotel manager.
“I think it means you can breastfeed here,” she remembers being told. “I said, ‘No. I don’t think that’s what it means’ but it got me thinking that we need something like that in Canada.”
What was needed was not just signs but the proper training so employees would know what aphasia was and how to help someone with the communication disorder.
So the University of Windsor psychology professor started, and is now the director of, Aphasia Friendly Canada which has been training employees and getting aphasia-friendly signs in Windsor restaurants and businesses this year.
Aphasia happens when there is damage to the brain and it affects the ability to speak, read and write to different degrees. It occurs in one in four people who have had a stroke and can happen with other brain injuries. There are more than 100,000 Canadians living with aphasia including an estimated 2,000 people in WindsorEssex, she said.
Buchanan decided to focus her studies on strokes and language impairment after her brother Michael’s stroke led to his aphasia. Her brother, like most people, didn’t regain the ability to speak. Aphasia is not the same as not speaking a language, she explained. Some people with aphasia can’t even gesture to make themselves understood.
“They’re completely cut off from other people,” Buchanan said of the invisible disability. “It’s the most depressing kind of disorder you can have.”
Buchanan started Aphasia Friendly Canada two years ago with some federal funding and private donations. It includes a small support group for caregivers and people with aphasia in Windsor and, for the first time, is offering education to businesses which she hopes can spread here and across Canada. Buchanan said Pat Hayes, owner of Windsor Tim Hortons restaurants, signed up to have employees at 13 local restaurants trained. The visual aids such as a picture menu not only gives people with aphasia a chance to order on their own, it can help customers who don’t speak English.
Julia Borsatto, associate director of Aphasia Friendly Canada who is a master’s student studying clini- cal neuropsychology, said aphasia is more common than Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis yet most people don’t know about the language disorder. She said people have likely encountered someone with aphasia but didn’t realize it because they are always with someone who speaks on their behalf.
There are different types of aphasia. Some people can’t speak and have trouble understanding what is said to them while others can understand and read but not speak.
“It doesn’t really affect their memory or intelligence,” Borsatto said.
Tips on communicating with someone who has aphasia include speaking slowly, using pictures, asking yes and no questions, and being patient.