The act of engaging in community isn’t just about promoting better healthcare; it’s about developing a more personable and comprehensive way of treating disease. Often those with the most severe mental-health issues end up being isolated, so that less complicated cases can benefit from institutional resources. However, a study from the journal Nature Neuroscience found that isolation actually reduces the production of myelin—a fiber that maintains our nerve cells—meaning these segregating treatments may only make mental illness worse. The countless studies reinforcing how many dementia patients feel lonely or isolated, juxtaposed with Hogewey’s considerable success with these residents, call into question how much of dementia is a result of disease, and how much is a result of how we treat it.

In traditional nursing homes, with their clinical appearance, the situation is openly communicated to residents—you’re sick, you can’t take care of yourself, you’re forgetting things again. But in Hogewey, the residents live in a place that looks and feels like home, even though it’s not; what others know to be a façade, they see as reality, which may help them to feel normal even in the midst of their disease. Psychologist Donald Spence defines the concept of “narrative reality” as the ways in which stories and places help link the “true” world to one that a person is better able to understand, using storytelling as a vehicle to understand the truth—you’re in a place that’s holistically normal, you’re not lost, etc.

In the years since Hogewey’s founding, dementia experts from the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, and Australia have all flocked to the unassuming Dutch town in the hopes of finding a blueprint for handling the global problem. While dementia-only living facilities have been created outside the Netherlands, none of them have offered the amenities or level of care per patient that Hogeway provides. Last year, inspired by Hogewey, a nursing home in Fartown, England, built a 1950s village for its residents; a similar project is underway in Wiedlisbach, Switzerland. But because cost is one of the greatest barriers to making self-contained villages the standard in dementia care, it would be extremely difficult to implement in a non-socialized healthcare system—meaning that in the U.S., a facility like Hogewey might be impossible for the forseeable future.

A few years ago, I watched my grandmother’s memory erode in a nursing home of the kind that Yvonne van Amerongen had tried to get away from. My grandmother had the medicine cabinet of a septuagenarian, and the progression of her dementia was predictable and not altogether different from the experience of numerous others. But she spent her last days in a nondescript building where doctors told her what she wasn’t, rather than what she was. She couldn’t live on her own, but she decimated us at Scrabble (like always) a few days before she passed away.

Glimpses of lucidity like that make the relatives of people with dementia yearn for an environment built around life rather than death. Hogewey hasn’t found a cure for dementia, but it’s found a path that’s changing ideas of how to treat those who can no longer take care of themselves.

“This is a terrible disease, but this place makes me a little less scared of it," Elly Goedhart, the daughter of a Hogewey resident, told Time in February.

Sometimes it truly does take a village.

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