Australian dad Fraser has shared his experience with early onset Alzheimer’s, including when his children first noticed changes in his behavior.
The 41-year-old father was diagnosed with Young-onset Alzheimer’s disease in mid-2024, though he began experiencing symptoms two years earlier. According to the Mayo Clinic, Young-onset Alzheimer’s is an “uncommon form of dementia” that begins before age 65. Alzheimer’s, the most common cause of dementia, affects memory, thinking, reasoning, and decision-making abilities, and can alter personality and behavior.
Fraser has been documenting his journey with the disease on his YouTube channel “I (don’t) have dementia.” In a video posted March 30, he answered various questions from viewers. He mentioned asking his children about what early symptoms they noticed in him.
“So I asked my kids just sort of casually and they said, ‘Everyone has memory issues that they have, they forget stuff in everyday life – we just noticed that you were just doing them more often, more frequently just normal, everyday memory lapses that everyone has,'” Fraser explained.
Though creating YouTube content has caused him some “stress,” Fraser believes it’s “not necessarily a bad thing.” He revealed that after his diagnosis, he initially tried to avoid thinking about it. “When I got diagnosed I kind of wanted to put it all out of my head as much as possible and not think about it, like six months later, five months, I – my mental health just crashed,” he said.
“I suddenly started getting panic attacks and feeling depressed. I kind of put that down to maybe it’s because I was burying my head in the sand and trying not to think about this stuff, but really it’s always in the back of your mind and so I just wasn’t dealing with it. And so, yeah I started seeing a psychologist, got on some medication – antidepressants.”
Fraser compares making these videos to talk therapy, saying they help him bring difficult topics “to the surface” and “unpack” them, ultimately taking some of the “scariness out of it.” He explains: “It’s just let’s bring it up unpack it, think about it, okay that’s how I feel about it, that’s what I’m experiencing, that’s what I’m thinking and it’s all sort of there and it’s manageable then in that sense.”
He acknowledges that this process “does invoke stress” but believes it’s “a necessary process to go through in order to reach acceptance. That’s what I’m thinking – could be totally wrong – but that’s where I’m sort of landed on.”