I shared the stage a year or two ago with a few people. There was a couple on the stage. One was a person with Alzheimer's and the other was his caregiver wife. They were relatively new to the city where they were living, having moved from back east, and didn't really have a lot of friends. They chose to tell people--friends and neighbours--in the city that he had suffered from TIAs, small strokes, rather than admit he had Alzheimer's. My jaw hit the stage. I was quite distressed. That to me is the stigma you talk about.
I say in my presentations that you address the stigma by addressing the stereotype. As long as the man on the street--I hate the phrase--thinks of Alzheimer's as being in the very elderly and in the final stages, society in general will not rally behind it, if you will. There's that sense of finality, whereas if you have a younger person out there saying, “I have the disease and there is life after diagnosis”, and that whole story, the stereotype changes. The feeling in society changes. The stigma is reduced, in my mind.