For Jessica Redmayne, dementia is the elephant in the room, and she’s determined to change that.

The 33-year-old Home and Away actress lost her mother Christine to the disease in 2023, and says it’s time society spoke about dementia as openly as other health conditions.

“I think it really does get shoved under the carpet because people are afraid of it, because there is no cure,” Redmayne told news.com.au.

“But if we are not afraid of it, and if we do implement the things like maintaining a healthy diet and looking after our brain then we can make a difference.

“We need to – for the sake of a better word – shove it down people’s throats and go ‘this is serious’.

“We can’t hide away from it and we need to take care of our brains.”

Redmayne is backing news.com.au and The Australian’s Think Again campaign, stressing that raising awareness about dementia means more to her than her rising career.

“Being a younger person, I feel like it’s what I was destined to do,” she said.

“I am very fortunate to work in the industry that I do, and the cherry on top of that is that I can spread awareness far and wide because people my age, hopefully, will hear me.

“I think about it quite often and I think it’s more important than my career itself.”

Her mum first began showing signs of the condition when Redmayne was 19, though it took another five years before doctors confirmed the diagnosis.

“I had seen my nanna have dementia and live in a home and show similar symptoms and that’s why our family, we knew what was going on,” she said.

“As a young teen to diagnosis to be honest it was the elephant in the room and we didn’t really acknowledge the fact that she was declining.

“We just kind of carried on with it. Once we had the diagnosis and it was on paper – that it was real – that’s when we started to put things in play to figure out how to better care for her and what the future was going to look like.”

That was when, she says, the real challenges began for her and her father, Paul.

“It was left to my father and I to seek help,” Redmayne explained.

“I quite literally joined an online university degree with the University of Tasmania to learn what dementia was because I didn’t actually understand what was happening to her brain.

“I knew that she was forgetting things, I knew her personality had changed dramatically because she was a very charismatic person and that decreased.

“But I’m a proactive person and I went out and I sought the people, whereas it’s not very readily available to people if they have no idea what they are doing.”

Images: Instagram