Author: Tess Maginess
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351798634
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194
Book Description
Dementia is an urgent global concern, often termed a widespread ‘problem’, ‘tragedy’ or ‘burden’ and a subject best addressed by health and social policy and practice. However, creative writers can offer powerful and imaginative insights into the experience of dementia across cultures and over time. This cross-disciplinary volume explores how engaging with dementia through its myriad literary representations can help to deepen and humanise attitudes to people living with the condition. Offering and interrogating a wide array of perspectives about how dementia might be ‘imagined’, this book allows us to see how different ways of being can inflect one another. By drawing on the ‘lived’ experience of the individual unique person and their loved ones, literature can contribute to a deeper and more compassionate and more liberating attitude to a phenomenon that is both natural and unnatural. Novels, plays and stories reveal a rich panoply of responses ranging from the tragic to the comic, allowing us to understand that people with dementia often offer us models of humour, courage and resilience, and carers can also embody a range of responses from rigidity to compassion. Dementia and Literature problematises the subject of dementia, encouraging us all to question our own hegemonies critically and creatively. Drawing on literary studies, cultural studies, education, clinical psychology, psychiatry, nursing and gerontology, this book is a fascinating contribution to the emerging area of the medical and health humanities. The book will be of interest to those living with dementia and their caregivers as well as to the academic community and policy makers.
On Vanishing
Author: Lynn Casteel Harper
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1948226294
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 126
Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice An essential book for those coping with Alzheimer’s and other cognitive disorders that “reframe[s] our understanding of dementia with sensitivity and accuracy . . . to grant better futures to our loved ones and ourselves” (The New York Times). An estimated fifty million people in the world suffer from dementia. Diseases such as Alzheimer's erase parts of one's memory but are also often said to erase the self. People don't simply die from such diseases; they are imagined, in the clichés of our era, as vanishing in plain sight, fading away, or enduring a long goodbye. In On Vanishing, Lynn Casteel Harper, a Baptist minister and nursing home chaplain, investigates the myths and metaphors surrounding dementia and aging, addressing not only the indignities caused by the condition but also by the rhetoric surrounding it. Harper asks essential questions about the nature of our outsized fear of dementia, the stigma this fear may create, and what it might mean for us all to try to “vanish well.” Weaving together personal stories with theology, history, philosophy, literature, and science, Harper confronts our elemental fears of disappearance and death, drawing on her own experiences with people with dementia both in the American healthcare system and within her own family. In the course of unpacking her own stories and encounters—of leading a prayer group on a dementia unit; of meeting individuals dismissed as “already gone” and finding them still possessed of complex, vital inner lives; of witnessing her grandfather’s final years with Alzheimer’s and discovering her own heightened genetic risk of succumbing to the disease—Harper engages in an exploration of dementia that is unlike anything written before on the subject. A rich and startling work of nonfiction, On Vanishing reveals cognitive change as it truly is, an essential aspect of what it means to be mortal.
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1948226294
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 126
Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice An essential book for those coping with Alzheimer’s and other cognitive disorders that “reframe[s] our understanding of dementia with sensitivity and accuracy . . . to grant better futures to our loved ones and ourselves” (The New York Times). An estimated fifty million people in the world suffer from dementia. Diseases such as Alzheimer's erase parts of one's memory but are also often said to erase the self. People don't simply die from such diseases; they are imagined, in the clichés of our era, as vanishing in plain sight, fading away, or enduring a long goodbye. In On Vanishing, Lynn Casteel Harper, a Baptist minister and nursing home chaplain, investigates the myths and metaphors surrounding dementia and aging, addressing not only the indignities caused by the condition but also by the rhetoric surrounding it. Harper asks essential questions about the nature of our outsized fear of dementia, the stigma this fear may create, and what it might mean for us all to try to “vanish well.” Weaving together personal stories with theology, history, philosophy, literature, and science, Harper confronts our elemental fears of disappearance and death, drawing on her own experiences with people with dementia both in the American healthcare system and within her own family. In the course of unpacking her own stories and encounters—of leading a prayer group on a dementia unit; of meeting individuals dismissed as “already gone” and finding them still possessed of complex, vital inner lives; of witnessing her grandfather’s final years with Alzheimer’s and discovering her own heightened genetic risk of succumbing to the disease—Harper engages in an exploration of dementia that is unlike anything written before on the subject. A rich and startling work of nonfiction, On Vanishing reveals cognitive change as it truly is, an essential aspect of what it means to be mortal.
Dementia
Author: Stephen Lewis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781950659944
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 376
Book Description
An extraordinary story demonstrating how the love between a dementia sufferer and her husband/caregiver sustained them even as the disease worked its way to its inevitable conclusion.
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781950659944
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 376
Book Description
An extraordinary story demonstrating how the love between a dementia sufferer and her husband/caregiver sustained them even as the disease worked its way to its inevitable conclusion.
Where the Light Gets In
Author: Kimberly Williams-Paisley
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 1101902965
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Book Description
“The relationship between a mother and daughter is one of the most complicated and meaningful there is. Kimberly Williams-Paisley writes about her own with grace, truth, and beauty as she shares her journey back to her mother in the wake of a devastating illness.” —Brooke Shields Many know Kimberly Williams-Paisley as the bride in the popular Steve Martin remakes of the Father of the Bride movies, the calculating Peggy Kenter on Nashville, or the wife of country music artist, Brad Paisley. But behind the scenes, Kim was dealing with a tragic secret: her mother, Linda, was suffering from a rare form of dementia that slowly crippled her ability to talk, write and eventually recognize people in her own family. Where the Light Gets In tells the full story of Linda’s illness—called primary progressive aphasia—from her early-onset diagnosis at the age of 62 through the present day. Kim draws a candid picture of the ways her family reacted for better and worse, and how she, her father and two siblings educated themselves, tried to let go of shame and secrecy, made mistakes, and found unexpected humor and grace in the midst of suffering. Ultimately the bonds of family were strengthened, and Kim learned ways to love and accept the woman her mother became. With a moving foreword by actor and advocate Michael J. Fox, Where the Light Gets In is a heartwarming tribute to the often fragile yet unbreakable relationships we have with our mothers.
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 1101902965
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Book Description
“The relationship between a mother and daughter is one of the most complicated and meaningful there is. Kimberly Williams-Paisley writes about her own with grace, truth, and beauty as she shares her journey back to her mother in the wake of a devastating illness.” —Brooke Shields Many know Kimberly Williams-Paisley as the bride in the popular Steve Martin remakes of the Father of the Bride movies, the calculating Peggy Kenter on Nashville, or the wife of country music artist, Brad Paisley. But behind the scenes, Kim was dealing with a tragic secret: her mother, Linda, was suffering from a rare form of dementia that slowly crippled her ability to talk, write and eventually recognize people in her own family. Where the Light Gets In tells the full story of Linda’s illness—called primary progressive aphasia—from her early-onset diagnosis at the age of 62 through the present day. Kim draws a candid picture of the ways her family reacted for better and worse, and how she, her father and two siblings educated themselves, tried to let go of shame and secrecy, made mistakes, and found unexpected humor and grace in the midst of suffering. Ultimately the bonds of family were strengthened, and Kim learned ways to love and accept the woman her mother became. With a moving foreword by actor and advocate Michael J. Fox, Where the Light Gets In is a heartwarming tribute to the often fragile yet unbreakable relationships we have with our mothers.
The Dementia Diaries
Author: Matthew Snyman
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
ISBN: 1784502855
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 127
Book Description
Longlisted for the School Library Association's Information Book Award 2017 - 'Over 12' category. Brie's Granddad has always been a serious man, never without a newspaper and knowing the answer to everything. But now he keeps losing track of the conversation, and honestly, Brie doesn't really know how to speak to him. At first, Fred was annoyed that Gramps had come to live with them, it meant he had to give up his room! But then he starts to enjoy watching old films with him and spending time together... although there's the small problem of Gramps calling him Simon. Follow the stories of Brie, Fred, and other young carers as they try to understand and cope with their grandparents' dementia at all stages of the illness. Adapted from true stories, and supplemented with fun activities and discussion ideas, this book for children aged approximately 7-14 cuts to the truth of the experience of dementia and tackles stigma with a warm and open perspective.
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
ISBN: 1784502855
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 127
Book Description
Longlisted for the School Library Association's Information Book Award 2017 - 'Over 12' category. Brie's Granddad has always been a serious man, never without a newspaper and knowing the answer to everything. But now he keeps losing track of the conversation, and honestly, Brie doesn't really know how to speak to him. At first, Fred was annoyed that Gramps had come to live with them, it meant he had to give up his room! But then he starts to enjoy watching old films with him and spending time together... although there's the small problem of Gramps calling him Simon. Follow the stories of Brie, Fred, and other young carers as they try to understand and cope with their grandparents' dementia at all stages of the illness. Adapted from true stories, and supplemented with fun activities and discussion ideas, this book for children aged approximately 7-14 cuts to the truth of the experience of dementia and tackles stigma with a warm and open perspective.
Unforgotten
Author: Bianca Brijnath
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782383557
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239
Book Description
As life expectancy increases in India, the number of people living with dementia will also rise. Yet little is known about how people in India cope with dementia, how relationships and identities change through illness and loss. In addressing this question, this book offers a rich ethnographic account of how middle-class families in urban India care for their relatives with dementia. From the husband who wakes up at 3 am to feed his wife ice-cream to the daughters who gave up employment for seven years to care for their mother with dementia, this book illuminates the local idioms on dementia and aging, the personal experience of care-giving, the functioning of stigma in daily life, and the social and cultural barriers in accessing support.
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782383557
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239
Book Description
As life expectancy increases in India, the number of people living with dementia will also rise. Yet little is known about how people in India cope with dementia, how relationships and identities change through illness and loss. In addressing this question, this book offers a rich ethnographic account of how middle-class families in urban India care for their relatives with dementia. From the husband who wakes up at 3 am to feed his wife ice-cream to the daughters who gave up employment for seven years to care for their mother with dementia, this book illuminates the local idioms on dementia and aging, the personal experience of care-giving, the functioning of stigma in daily life, and the social and cultural barriers in accessing support.
We Danced
Author: Scott M. Rose
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781736820346
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 420
Book Description
This memoir shares the early, troubled years of the author's wife and transitions to their first meeting, relationship, and marriage. A woman with low self-esteem found courage, comfort, and support and dared to dream again. Friends and family often referred to their marriage as a romance meant to be. Frontotemporal Dementia, FTD, interrupted that love story. The author devotedly cared for his wife until her passing. He weaves in journals, letters, and posts and lays bare their life through her incurable disease. Throughout much of the book, the author offers dementia mileposts, tips, and observations to assist those struggling in their own journeys. While dementia will differ person to person, many will find similarities to their own experiences. The book serves two purposes as both an aid to those in a dementia care partner role but also as a love story.
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781736820346
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 420
Book Description
This memoir shares the early, troubled years of the author's wife and transitions to their first meeting, relationship, and marriage. A woman with low self-esteem found courage, comfort, and support and dared to dream again. Friends and family often referred to their marriage as a romance meant to be. Frontotemporal Dementia, FTD, interrupted that love story. The author devotedly cared for his wife until her passing. He weaves in journals, letters, and posts and lays bare their life through her incurable disease. Throughout much of the book, the author offers dementia mileposts, tips, and observations to assist those struggling in their own journeys. While dementia will differ person to person, many will find similarities to their own experiences. The book serves two purposes as both an aid to those in a dementia care partner role but also as a love story.
Dementia and Literature
Author: Tess Maginess
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351798634
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194
Book Description
Dementia is an urgent global concern, often termed a widespread ‘problem’, ‘tragedy’ or ‘burden’ and a subject best addressed by health and social policy and practice. However, creative writers can offer powerful and imaginative insights into the experience of dementia across cultures and over time. This cross-disciplinary volume explores how engaging with dementia through its myriad literary representations can help to deepen and humanise attitudes to people living with the condition. Offering and interrogating a wide array of perspectives about how dementia might be ‘imagined’, this book allows us to see how different ways of being can inflect one another. By drawing on the ‘lived’ experience of the individual unique person and their loved ones, literature can contribute to a deeper and more compassionate and more liberating attitude to a phenomenon that is both natural and unnatural. Novels, plays and stories reveal a rich panoply of responses ranging from the tragic to the comic, allowing us to understand that people with dementia often offer us models of humour, courage and resilience, and carers can also embody a range of responses from rigidity to compassion. Dementia and Literature problematises the subject of dementia, encouraging us all to question our own hegemonies critically and creatively. Drawing on literary studies, cultural studies, education, clinical psychology, psychiatry, nursing and gerontology, this book is a fascinating contribution to the emerging area of the medical and health humanities. The book will be of interest to those living with dementia and their caregivers as well as to the academic community and policy makers.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351798634
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 194
Book Description
Dementia is an urgent global concern, often termed a widespread ‘problem’, ‘tragedy’ or ‘burden’ and a subject best addressed by health and social policy and practice. However, creative writers can offer powerful and imaginative insights into the experience of dementia across cultures and over time. This cross-disciplinary volume explores how engaging with dementia through its myriad literary representations can help to deepen and humanise attitudes to people living with the condition. Offering and interrogating a wide array of perspectives about how dementia might be ‘imagined’, this book allows us to see how different ways of being can inflect one another. By drawing on the ‘lived’ experience of the individual unique person and their loved ones, literature can contribute to a deeper and more compassionate and more liberating attitude to a phenomenon that is both natural and unnatural. Novels, plays and stories reveal a rich panoply of responses ranging from the tragic to the comic, allowing us to understand that people with dementia often offer us models of humour, courage and resilience, and carers can also embody a range of responses from rigidity to compassion. Dementia and Literature problematises the subject of dementia, encouraging us all to question our own hegemonies critically and creatively. Drawing on literary studies, cultural studies, education, clinical psychology, psychiatry, nursing and gerontology, this book is a fascinating contribution to the emerging area of the medical and health humanities. The book will be of interest to those living with dementia and their caregivers as well as to the academic community and policy makers.
Fictions of Dementia
Author: Susanne Katharina Christ
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110789809
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 540
Book Description
Taking its cues from both classical and post-classical narratologies, this study explores both forms and functions of the representation of dementia in Anglophone fictions. Initially, dementia is conceptualised as a narrative-epistemological paradox: The more those affected know what it is like to have dementia, the less they can tell about it. Narrative fiction is the only discourse that provides an imaginative glimpse at the subjective experience of dementia in language. The narratological modelling of four ‘narrative modes’ elaborates how the paradox becomes productive in fiction: Depending on the narrative perspective taken, but also on the type of narration, the technique for representing consciousness and the epistemic strategy of narrating dementia, the respective narrative modes come with different prerequisites and possibilities for narrating dementia. The analysis of four contemporary Anglophone dementia fictions based on the developed model reveals their potential functions: Fiction allows readers to learn about the challenges of dementia, grants them perspective-taking, it trains cognitive flexibility, and explores the meaning of memory, knowledge, narrative and imagination, and thus also offers trajectories of a cultural coping with dementia.
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110789809
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 540
Book Description
Taking its cues from both classical and post-classical narratologies, this study explores both forms and functions of the representation of dementia in Anglophone fictions. Initially, dementia is conceptualised as a narrative-epistemological paradox: The more those affected know what it is like to have dementia, the less they can tell about it. Narrative fiction is the only discourse that provides an imaginative glimpse at the subjective experience of dementia in language. The narratological modelling of four ‘narrative modes’ elaborates how the paradox becomes productive in fiction: Depending on the narrative perspective taken, but also on the type of narration, the technique for representing consciousness and the epistemic strategy of narrating dementia, the respective narrative modes come with different prerequisites and possibilities for narrating dementia. The analysis of four contemporary Anglophone dementia fictions based on the developed model reveals their potential functions: Fiction allows readers to learn about the challenges of dementia, grants them perspective-taking, it trains cognitive flexibility, and explores the meaning of memory, knowledge, narrative and imagination, and thus also offers trajectories of a cultural coping with dementia.
The Politics of Dementia
Author: Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110713705
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246
Book Description
Memory loss is not always viewed purely as a contingent neurobiological process present in an ageing population; rather, it is frequently related to larger societal issues and political debates. This edited volume examines how different media and genres – novels, auto/biographical writings, documentary as well as fictional films and graphic memoirs – represent dementia for the sake of critical explorations of memory, trauma and contested truths. In ten analytical chapters and one piece of graphic art, the contributors examine the ways in which what might seem to be the individual, ahistorical diseases of dementia are used in contemporary cultural texts to represent and respond to violent historical and political events – ranging from the Holocaust to postcolonial conditions – all of which can prove difficult to remember. Combining approaches from literary studies with insights from memory studies, trauma studies, anthropology, the critical medical humanities and media, film and comics studies, this volume explores the politics of dementia and incites new debates on cultures of remembrance, while remaining attentive to the lived reality of dementia.
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110713705
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246
Book Description
Memory loss is not always viewed purely as a contingent neurobiological process present in an ageing population; rather, it is frequently related to larger societal issues and political debates. This edited volume examines how different media and genres – novels, auto/biographical writings, documentary as well as fictional films and graphic memoirs – represent dementia for the sake of critical explorations of memory, trauma and contested truths. In ten analytical chapters and one piece of graphic art, the contributors examine the ways in which what might seem to be the individual, ahistorical diseases of dementia are used in contemporary cultural texts to represent and respond to violent historical and political events – ranging from the Holocaust to postcolonial conditions – all of which can prove difficult to remember. Combining approaches from literary studies with insights from memory studies, trauma studies, anthropology, the critical medical humanities and media, film and comics studies, this volume explores the politics of dementia and incites new debates on cultures of remembrance, while remaining attentive to the lived reality of dementia.
Dementias
Author: Charles Duyckaerts
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0080559867
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 936
Book Description
This volume provides a comprehensive understanding of the biology of dementias, including information on advancements in the way these disorders are perceived and studied. From earlier assumptions that cognitive deficits were simply age related, this handbook progresses into complex discussions of the diseases that affect the cortex of the human brain. Clinicians will find extensive diagnostic and research perspectives on a variety of interesting topics, including neuropathology, physiopathology, biology, clinics, and imaging information on all, or most, of the dementing disorders currently known. In addition, chapters devoted to legal and ethical issues give practitioners and health care workers an informative view on complex dementias and the way these disorders affect patients and families. Clinicians in all levels of expertise will find useful and synthetic information. * Comprehensive information on advancements in the study and diagnosis of dementias * Complex discussions of the diseases that affect the cortex of the human brain* Extensive diagnostic and research perspectives on topics including, but not limited to, neuropathology, physiopathology, and groundbreaking imaging techniques* A reference guide that is appropriate for clinicians in all levels of expertise, from researchers to basic health care providers
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 0080559867
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 936
Book Description
This volume provides a comprehensive understanding of the biology of dementias, including information on advancements in the way these disorders are perceived and studied. From earlier assumptions that cognitive deficits were simply age related, this handbook progresses into complex discussions of the diseases that affect the cortex of the human brain. Clinicians will find extensive diagnostic and research perspectives on a variety of interesting topics, including neuropathology, physiopathology, biology, clinics, and imaging information on all, or most, of the dementing disorders currently known. In addition, chapters devoted to legal and ethical issues give practitioners and health care workers an informative view on complex dementias and the way these disorders affect patients and families. Clinicians in all levels of expertise will find useful and synthetic information. * Comprehensive information on advancements in the study and diagnosis of dementias * Complex discussions of the diseases that affect the cortex of the human brain* Extensive diagnostic and research perspectives on topics including, but not limited to, neuropathology, physiopathology, and groundbreaking imaging techniques* A reference guide that is appropriate for clinicians in all levels of expertise, from researchers to basic health care providers