Download or read book Popularizing Dementia written by Aagje Swinnen and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2015-11-30 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How are individual and social ideas of late-onset dementia shaped and negotiated in film, literature, the arts, and the media? And how can the symbolic forms provided by popular culture be adopted and transformed by those affected in order to express their own perspectives? This international and interdisciplinary volume summarizes central current research trends and opens new theoretical and empirical perspectives on dementia in popular culture. It includes contributions by internationally renowned scholars from the humanities, social and cultural gerontology, age(ing) studies, cultural studies, philosophy, and bioethics. Contributions by Lucy Burke, Marlene Goldman, Annette Leibing and others.

Download or read book Reconsidering Dementia Narratives written by Rebecca Bitenc and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-05 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconsidering Dementia Narratives explores the role of narrative in developing new ways of understanding, interacting with, and caring for people with dementia. It asks how the stories we tell about dementia – in fiction, life writing and film – both reflect and shape the way we think about this important condition. Highlighting the need to attend to embodied and relational aspects of identity in dementia, the study further outlines ways in which narratives may contribute to dementia care, while disputing the idea that the modes of empathy fostered by narrative necessarily bring about more humane care practices. This cross-medial analysis represents an interdisciplinary approach to dementia narratives which range across auto/biography, graphic narrative, novel, film, documentary and collaborative storytelling practices. The book aims to clarify the limits and affordances of narrative, and narrative studies, in relation to an ethically driven medical humanities agenda through the use of case studies. Answering the key question of whether dementia narratives align with or run counter to the dominant discourse of dementia as ‘loss of self’, this innovative book will be of interest to anyone interested in dementia studies, ageing studies, narrative studies in health care, and critical medical humanities.

Download or read book Dementia and Literature written by Tess Maginess and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-08-09 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Politics of Dementia written by Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-11-22 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Fictions of Dementia written by Susanne Katharina Christ and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-09-20 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book American Dementia written by Daniel R. George and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Have the social safety nets, environmental protections, and policies to redress wealth and income inequality enacted after World War II contributed to declining rates of dementia today—and how do we improve brain health in the future? Winner of the American Book Fest Health: Aging/50+ by the American Book Fest, Living Now Book Award: Mature Living/Aging by the Living Now Book Awards For decades, researchers have chased a pharmaceutical cure for memory loss. But despite the fact that no disease-modifying biotech treatments have emerged, new research suggests that dementia rates have actually declined in the United States and Western Europe over the last decade. Why is this happening? And what does it mean for brain health in the future? In American Dementia, Daniel R. George, PhD, MSc, and Peter J. Whitehouse, MD, PhD, argue that the current decline of dementia may be strongly linked to mid–twentieth century policies that reduced inequality, provided widespread access to education and healthcare, and brought about cleaner air, soil, and water. They also • explain why Alzheimer's disease, an obscure clinical label until the 1970s, is the hallmark illness of our current hyper-capitalist era; • reveal how the soaring inequalities of the twenty-first century—which are sowing poverty, barriers to healthcare and education, loneliness, lack of sleep, stressful life events, environmental exposures, and climate change—are reversing the gains of the twentieth century and damaging our brains; • tackle the ageist tendencies in our culture, which disadvantage both vulnerable youth and elders; • make an evidence-based argument that policies like single-payer healthcare, a living wage, and universal access to free higher education and technical training programs will build collective resilience to dementia; • promote strategies that show how local communities can rise above the disconnection and loneliness that define our present moment and come together to care for our struggling neighbors. Ultimately, American Dementia asserts that actively remembering lessons from the twentieth century which help us become a healthier, wiser, and more compassionate society represents our most powerful intervention for preventing Alzheimer's and protecting human dignity. Exposing the inconvenient truths that confound market-based approaches to memory enhancement as well as broader social organization, the book imagines how we can act as citizens to protect our brains, build the cognitive resilience of younger generations, and rise to the moral challenge of caring for the cognitively frail.

Download or read book Voices of Illness Negotiating Meaning and Identity written by Peter Bray and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-03-27 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers accounts of scholarly interdisciplinary practices and perspectives that examine and discuss the positive potential of attending to the voices and stories of those who live and work with illness in real world settings.

Download or read book The Biopolitics of Dementia written by James Rupert Fletcher and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-11-24 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how dementia studies relates to dementia’s growing public profile and corresponding research economy. The book argues that a neuropsychiatric biopolitics of dementia positions dementia as a syndrome of cognitive decline, caused by discrete brain diseases, distinct from ageing, widely misunderstood by the public, that will one day be overcome through technoscience. This biopolitics generates dementia’s public profile and is implicated in several problems, including the failure of drug discovery, the spread of stigma, the perpetuation of social inequalities and the lack of support that is available to people affected by dementia. Through a failure to critically engage with neuropsychiatric biopolitics, much dementia studies is complicit in these problems. Drawing on insights from critical psychiatry and critical gerontology, this book explores these problems and the relations between them, revealing how they are facilitated by neuro-agnostic dementia studies work that lacks robust biopolitical critiques and sociopolitical alternatives. In response, the book makes the case for a more biopolitically engaged "neurocritical" dementia studies and shows how such a tradition might be realised through the promotion of a promissory sociopolitics of dementia.

Download or read book A Critical History of Dementia Studies written by James Rupert Fletcher and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-26 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers the first ever critical history of dementia studies. Focusing on the emergence of dementia studies as a discrete area of academic interest in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, it draws on critical theory to interrogate the very notion of dementia studies as an entity, shedding light on the affinities and contradictions that characterise the field. Drawing together a collection of internationally renowned experts in a variety of fields, including people with dementia, this volume includes perspectives from education, the arts, human rights and much more. This critical history sets out the shared intellectual space of ‘dementia studies’, from which non-medical dementia research can progress. The book is intended for researchers, academics and students of dementia studies, social gerontology, disability, chronic illness, health and social care. It will also appeal to activists and practitioners engaged in social work and caregiving involved in dementia research.

Download or read book Ageing Dementia and the Social Mind written by Paul Higgs and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking exploration of the sociology of dementia — with contributions from distinguished international scholars and practitioners. Organised around the four themes of personhood, care, social representations and social differentiation Provides a critical look at dementia and demonstrates how sociology and other disciplines can help us understand its social context as well as the challenges it poses Contributing authors explore the social terrain, responding in part, to Paul Higgs’ and Chris Gilleard’s highly influential work on ageing Breaks new ground in giving specific attention to the social and cultural dimensions of responses to dementia

Download or read book Emerging Technologies for Diagnosing Alzheimer s Disease written by Marianne Boenink and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores international biomedical research and development on the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. It offers timely, multidisciplinary reflections on the social and ethical issues raised by promises of early diagnostics and asks under which conditions emerging diagnostic technologies can be considered a responsible innovation. The initial chapters in this edited volume provide an overview and a critical discussion of recent developments in biomedical research on Alzheimer's disease. Subsequent contributions explore the values at stake in current practices of dealing with Alzheimer's disease and dementia, both within and outside the biomedical domain. Novel diagnostic technologies for Alzheimer's disease emerge in a complex and shifting field, full of controversies. Innovating with care requires a precise mapping of how concepts, values and responsibilities are filled in through the confrontation of practices. In doing so, the volume offers a practice-based approach of responsible innovation that is also applicable to other fields of innovation.

Download or read book Mediating Alzheimer s written by Scott Selberg and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the representational culture of Alzheimer’s disease and how media technologies shape our ideas of cognition and aging With no known cause or cure despite a century of research, Alzheimer’s disease is a true medical mystery. In Mediating Alzheimer’s, Scott Selberg examines the nature of this enduring national health crisis by looking at the disease’s relationship to media and representation. He shows how collective investments in different kinds of media have historically shaped how we understand, treat, and live with this disease. Selberg demonstrates how the cognitive abilities that Alzheimer’s threatens—memory, for example—are integrated into the operations of representational technologies, from Polaroid photographs to Post-its to digital artificial intelligence. Focusing on a wide variety of media technologies, such as neuroimaging, art therapy, virtual reality, and social media, he shows how these cognitively oriented media ultimately help define personhood for people with Alzheimer’s. Media have changed the practices of successful aging in the United States, and Selberg takes us deep into how technologies like digital brain-training and online care networks shape ideas of cognition and healthy aging. Packed with startlingly fresh insights, Mediating Alzheimer’s contributes to debates around bioethics, the labor of caregiving, and a national economy increasingly invested in communication and digital media. Probing the very technologies that promise to save and understand our brains, it gives us new ways of understanding Alzheimer’s disease and aging in America.

Download or read book Alzheimer s Disease in Contemporary U S Fiction written by Cristina Garrigós and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-28 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume seeks to bring readers to a deeper understanding of contemporary cultural and social configurations of Alzheimer’s disease by analyzing 21st-century U.S. novels in which the disease plays a key narrative role. Via analysis of selected works, Garrigós considers how the erasure of memory in a person with Alzheimer’s affects our idea of the identity of that person and their sense of belonging to a group. Starting out from three different types of memory (individual, social and cultural), the study focuses on the narrative strategies that authors use to configure how the disease is perceived and represented. This study is significant not only because of what the texts reveal about those with Alzheimer’s, but also for what they say about us - about the authors and readers who are producing and consuming these texts, about how we see this disease, and what our attitudes to it say about contemporary U.S. society.

Download or read book Wandering Explorers written by Doug Wornell and published by Chipmunkapublishing ltd. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DescriptionWandering Explorers is a guide for families who are making the lengthy and agonizing journey through the course of a loved one's dementia. The title itself reminds us of the devastation that occurs in the brain - leading to wandering and confusion. And yet, there remains a curious human drive to explore and find purpose of life. Understanding this duality in dementia patients turns what is otherwise an apathetic family tragedy into a meaningful terminal event. This book is written in easy to understand terms and describes a multitude of aspects of brain disease including the many types of dementia, medical issues, drugs, behavioral management and the severe social consequences of this disease. This book is unique not only because of its concise nature but that it is essentially a compilation of all the common questions our practice has been asked over the years. It provides answers about what to expect in the various stages of dementia, how the diagnosis is made, and proper treatments relative to the stage of disease. Wandering Explorers does not provide any false hope. It is made clear that this is a fatal neurologic disease where end of life preparation needs to be dealt with head on. But Wandering Explorers takes a family to another level by providing information about realities of elder care you will not find in any other book. Dispelled, is the myth propagated by "Big Pharma" and the academic community over emphasizing the prevalence of Alzheimer's disease in the face of the normal aging process. This has side tracked the geriatric medicine community onto CNN waiting for a cure that will never come just as sure as people will keep getting old. Meanwhile companies get rich and professors who don't actually treat dementia patients get famous. And there's the popular and inappropriate use of anxiety drugs to calm agitation in confused patients or the appropriate use of antipsychotics in the elderly despite the FDA warning against them. These are some of the eye openers you will find in this book. With this knowledge a family can better understand actual mechanisms of disease, make proper treatment decisions, and even begin their own personal brain health programs. About the AuthorDouglas Wornell, MD is a geriatric psychiatrist with a large practice in the Seattle-Tacoma area of Washington State, USA. He was born in 1955 in Tacoma and has lived throughout the United States. Dr. Wornell got his bachelor's degree in chemistry at the University of Puget Sound and his medical degree at the University of Miami. He did his internship in general surgery at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and his residency in psychiatry at St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York City. Dr. Wornell lived in New York City for 13 years, eventually becoming the Director of Psychiatric Emergency Services for St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital Center and Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He is now back home in Washington State and is the Medical Director of the Behavioral Wellness Center at Auburn Regional Medical Center. He has participated in the treatment of over twenty thousand dementia patients in the past ten years. Additionally he is the Medical Director of Wornell Psychiatry and Associates, a geriatric and neurological psychiatry consultative service covering over 2000 long term care patients. He has given over 200 presentations on geriatric psychiatry. Dr. Wornell does prefer to be called Doug. He lives on a small farm on Fox Island in the Puget Sound where he, his wife Michelle, and two daughters raise their own organic beef and poultry. He is an eagle scout, an avid skier, plays jazz piano, paints and has written 6 screenplays. Dr. Wornell is a commercial flight instructor and floatplane charter pilot....when he finds the time.

Download or read book Alzheimer s Disease and Dementia written by Steven R. Sabat and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-02 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alzheimer's is swiftly on the rise: it is estimated that every 67 seconds, someone develops the disease. For many, the words "Alzheimer's disease" or "dementia" immediately denote severe mental loss and, perhaps, madness. Indeed, the vast majority of media coverage of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other types of dementia focuses primarily on the losses experienced by people diagnosed and the terrible burden felt by care partners yearning for a "magic bullet" drug cure. Providing an accessible, question-and-answer-format primer on what touches so many lives, and yet so few of us understand, Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia: What Everyone Needs to Know® contributes what is urgently missing from public knowledge: unsparing investigation of their causes and manifestations, and focus on the strengths possessed by people diagnosed. Steven R. Sabat mines a large body of research to convey the genetic and biological aspects of Alzheimer's disease, its clinical history, and, most significantly, to reveal the subjective experience of those with Alzheimer's or dementia. By clarifying the terms surrounding dementia and Alzheimer's, which are two distinct conditions, Sabat corrects dangerous misconceptions that plague our understanding of memory dysfunction and many other significant abilities that people with AD and dementia possess even in the moderate to severe stages. People diagnosed with AD retain awareness, thinking ability, and sense of self; crucially, Sabat demonstrates that there are ways to facilitate communication even when the person with AD has great difficulty finding the words he or she wants to use. From years spent exploring and observing the points of view and experiences of people diagnosed, Sabat strives to inform as well as to remind readers of the respect and empathy owed to those diagnosed and living with dementia. Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia conveys this type of information and more, which, when applied by family and professional caregivers, will help improve the quality of life of those diagnosed as well as of those who provide support and care.

Download or read book Transformed States written by Martin Halliwell and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2024-11-15 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transformed States offers a timely history of the politics, ethics, medical applications, and cultural representations of the biotechnological revolution, from the Human Genome Project to the COVID-19 pandemic. In exploring the entanglements of mental and physical health in an age of biotechnology, it views the post–Cold War 1990s as the horizon for understanding the intersection of technoscience and culture in the early twenty-first century. The book draws on original research spanning the presidencies of George H. W. Bush and Joe Biden to show how the politics of science and technology shape the medical uses of biotechnology. Some of these technologies reveal fierce ideological conflicts in the arenas of cloning, reproduction, artificial intelligence, longevity, gender affirmation, vaccination and environmental health. Interweaving politics and culture, the book illustrates how these health issues are reflected in and challenged by literary and cinematic texts, from Oryx and Crake to Annihilation, and from Gattaca to Avatar. By assessing the complex relationship between federal politics and the biomedical industry, Transformed States develops an ecological approach to public health that moves beyond tensions between state governance and private enterprise. To that end, Martin Halliwell analyzes thirty years that radically transformed American science, medicine, and policy, positioning biotechnology in dialogue with fears and fantasies about an emerging future in which health is ever more contested. Along with the two earlier books, Therapeutic Revolutions (2013) and Voices of Mental Health (2017), Transformed States is the final volume of a landmark cultural and intellectual history of mental health in the United States, journeying from the combat zones of World War II to the global emergency of COVID-19.

Download or read book Successful Aging as a Contemporary Obsession written by Sarah Lamb and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-22 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, the North American public has pursued an inspirational vision of successful aging—striving through medical technique and individual effort to eradicate the declines, vulnerabilities, and dependencies previously commonly associated with old age. On the face of it, this bold new vision of successful, healthy, and active aging is highly appealing. But it also rests on a deep cultural discomfort with aging and being old. The contributors to Successful Aging as a Contemporary Obsession explore how the successful aging movement is playing out across five continents. Their chapters investigate a variety of people, including Catholic nuns in the United States; Hindu ashram dwellers; older American women seeking plastic surgery; aging African-American lesbians and gay men in the District of Columbia; Chicago home health care workers and their aging clients; Mexican men foregoing Viagra; dementia and Alzheimer sufferers in the United States and Brazil; and aging policies in Denmark, Poland, India, China, Japan, and Uganda. This book offers a fresh look at a major cultural and public health movement of our time, questioning what has become for many a taken-for-granted goal—aging in a way that almost denies aging itself.