Today Tanya is here to help us understand the scope of the caregiving crisis.

So, Tanya, what made you interested in pursuing this story?

So, as we know, so many of us become caregivers ourselves at some point in our lives, and this is something that I myself experienced when I became a caregiver for my mom when she was diagnosed with a very serious lung illness a couple years ago, and suddenly I found myself thrust into this role of taking care of her, even though I lived far away, and we were experiencing a pandemic at the time.

But she was eventually, fortunately, able to receive a lung transplant, and after that, I was also very involved in her care.

And just that whole experience of shifting my whole identity to accommodate taking care of her was something that I felt, you know, was probably a very common experience.

And I was talking about this with my colleague, Lauren Young, who's our associate health editor.

Her mom had a similar experience of taking care of her mother, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

And I think that we realized that we both had understood what it was like to become a caregiver, and I think we just really wanted to talk to other people and find out what the research shows about what kinds of stresses people experience when they're caregivers and also what kinds of resources are available to help people because this is such a common and often challenging experience.

Yeah, no, I have some personal experience in that my grandmother, who lived with us my whole life, had dementia near the end of her life, and I very much tried to be there to support my mom, who was really her primary caregiver.

And it's such a challenging process, even when you have all the privilege and the resources in the world, which, of course, many people don't.