Private boarding house in Kazakhstan. Photo: Sayya Asanova. All rights reserved.In Kazakhstan, people with Alzheimer’s are officially declared legally incompetent, and deprived of their civil and political rights. There are, moreover, no specialised facilities for people with dementia – they can only be placed in psychiatric care homes. There is, or course, another option – aged parents can be looked after at home, by their family. But this affects not only the finances of the family, but the mental health of its other members. Families living with someone with dementia are prone to codependency and emotional burnout.
In other words, in Kazakhstan – like other countries – Alzheimer’s has a serious effect not only on the person who has the condition, but on the people around them: members of the able-bodied population, taxpayers. But this isn’t taken into account when issues around Alzheimer’s are discussed. Why does Kazakhstan, a rich country thanks to its mineral resources, pay so little attention to this condition?
International figures show that in rich countries, the prevalence of Alzheimer’s will rise by 116% between 2015 and 2050, whereas the increase in states with a medium-to-low income level will be 264%. Kazakhstan falls into the second category and the forecast looks critical. Figures published by the Ministry of Health for 2017 state, however, that there are only 187 people with dementia in the country. So, given a population of 18 million, only 0.001% of them have Alzheimer’s. This would seem like an excellent situation, were it not for one big “but”. People in Kazakhstan are given no information about the condition, so they don’t seek diagnosis. In post-Soviet countries, signs of dementia are traditionally put down to simple senility.
