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.

What is dementia? How should we organize dementia care? This comprehensive book critically examines the main approaches to understanding dementia (bio-medical, social-psychological and socio-gerontological) and the main principles and ideologies of care. The book: • provides clarity on the gap between the utopian aspirations of care and the reality of care • opens up a series of questions about knowledge and treatment of dementia • argues for a transition from positions that place emphasis upon the individual or particular care services to the social, cultural and economic context Lively, informative and challenging, the book will be of interest to students of nursing, sociology of health & illness, social work and social gerontology. Anthea Innes teaches at the Dementia Services Development Centre, University of Stirling

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.

Using linguistic data, this book examines language and communication in dementias and their clinical treatment by language pathologists.

With contributions from experienced dementia practitioners and care researchers, this book examines the impact of culture and ethnicity on the experience of dementia and on the provision of support and services, both in general terms and in relation to specific minority ethnic communities. Drawing together evidence-based research and expert practitioners' experiences, this book highlights the ways that dementia care services will need to develop in order to ensure that provision is culturally appropriate for an increasingly diverse older population. The book examines cultural issues in terms of assessment and engagement with people with dementia, challenges for care homes, and issues for supporting families from diverse ethnic backgrounds in relation to planning end of life care and bereavement. First-hand accounts of living with dementia from a range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds give unique perspectives into different attitudes to dementia and dementia care. The contributors also examine recent policy and strategy on dementia care and the implications for working with culture and ethnicity. This comprehensive and timely book is essential reading for dementia care practitioners, researchers and policy makers.

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.

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and is freely available to read online. This book systematically explores and assesses the quality of the evidence base for effective and supportive design of living environments for people living with Dementia.