Dear @labrown

I used to think that one of the members of my local caregiver group was lucky because her husband happily organized his many plant seeds for hours every day. The previous responders to your post have shared great ideas about how they have dealt with similar "re-arrangement of items". But what I tuned into in your post was this: "When I ask him why he feels the need to do this his he says to keep “them” from stealing everything. He is very paranoid that there are people here, in and around our home, that want to hurt him or steal from him." I am so sorry to hear this. It must be very disturbing to him.

My whole approach to the 16 years of Alzheimer's that we have lived through has been to keep my husband from feeling the negative effects of the illness. My approach has been to increasingly structure his days so that he is always carried along on a set of pleasant events or moments. This way, as the Alzheimer's-driven confusion increased, he was never left to stew in that confusion, or the dark thoughts that the confusion seemed to engender. I wonder if more distraction would drive out some of the paranoia. I understand that this puts more of a burden on you, but if you turn this campaign of positive distraction into activities that BOTH of you enjoy, there is a huge ( potentially even life altering ) double benefit: He avoids the paranoia and you get enjoyment time, which, I suspect is not abundant in your life right now. Of course, if you can dole out some of the distraction/enjoyment activities to other friends or hired companions, you can also gain some peaceful work or rest time for yourself.

Let me say that my husband's symptoms have not included paranoia. (For a brief time he started to feel afraid, but I was able to change that because it stemmed from a particular set of interactions that I could stop for him). A brief amount of reading on this indicates that the recommendation for treating paranoia is therapy and medication. Therapy is probably not an option at this stage (and the Pleasant Moments "'treatment" above may be the nearest substitute). But you may want to talk to his doctor about medication. This disease robs our loved ones of so much; it is terrible to think that pain like this paranoia is what it 'gifts' instead.

Wishing you and your husband all the best.