This video is available for you to purchase and personalise with your logo and contact details for £95+VAT. 20% of this cost will be given to Esme’s Umbrella in support of CBS. Simply email [email protected] with your request and include your logo and contact details for the closing slide.
About Charles Bonnet Syndrome & Esme’s Umbrella
Written by Judith Potts, founder of Esme’s Umbrella and daughter of a Charles Bonnet Syndrome sufferer
Charles Bonnet Syndrome is a disturbing, distressing and untreatable condition. Low vision or complete loss of sight can lead to silent visual hallucinations of all types – from patterns, words and insects to slugs, worms, buildings, people and water. Sometimes, the whole room morphs into a different, unknown place.
There is no medication to alleviate the visual hallucinations and very few specialists are knowledgeable about the condition.
It is vitally important that sufferers of Charles Bonnet Syndrome are not misdiagnosed through unawareness of the condition. Many people, my mother included, suffer in frightened silence, assuming that the hallucinations are the precursor to dementia. For her, and for many others, the visual hallucinations tormented the last years of her life. Her GP was unable to offer any form of support or advice and dismissed the Syndrome as ‘unlikely’, purely because she was unaware of it.
In order to create awareness about CBS, The Help and Information Service (as part of their on-going research and development programme) and Esme’s Umbrella, the Awareness Campaign for Charles Bonnet Syndrome that I launched in memory of my late mother, Esme, commissioned Health and Care Videos to produce this video. The video is also on Esme’s Umbrella’s website www.charlesbonnetsyndrome.uk which also carries coping strategies, experiences of sufferers, current research and a printable explanatory leaflet which can be taken to the GP or Care Home.
A statement from Laurence Kelly, Director of TH&IS:
‘People approach The Help and Information Service on a wide range of subjects for factual information. We must be 100% confident that the information we provide is just that – factual – and from a trustworthy source.
When researching and developing our library of information linked to health and care subjects, we could think of no better resource than to use videos to respond to requests. Commissioning Health and Care Videos as part of our R&D process was a natural fit given their partnership with a respected NHS Trust.
The fear of dementia is very much the same as the fear we once all felt about cancer. Now, thanks to clinical research, being more aware of symptoms and ever improving medical awareness, a greater number of us live than die and the fear is lessened at diagnosis.
We believe much the same journey will now start as a result of the CBS video being widely available to the medical profession, the public, the families of those living with the symptoms, and enable them to be better informed and to consider, “Could this be Charles Bonnet Syndrome?” before they automatically consider dementia.’
For more information on The Help and Information Service visit www.thehelpandinformationservice.com
This video is available for you to purchase and personalise with your logo and contact details for £95+VAT. 20% of this cost will be given to Esme’s Umbrella in support of CBS. Simply email [email protected] with your request and include your logo and contact details for the closing slide.
