Full Description
Memory loss can be one of the most terrifying aspects of a diagnosis of dementia. Yet the fear and dread of losing our memory make the experience of the disease worse than it needs to be, according to cultural critic and playwright Anne Davis Basting. She says, Forget memory. Basting emphasizes the importance of activities that focus on the present to improve the lives of persons with Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. Based on ten years of practice and research in the field, Basting's study includes specific examples of innovative programs that stimulate growth, humor, and emotional connection; translates into accessible language a wide range of provocative academic works on memory; and addresses how advances in medical research and clinical practice are already pushing radical changes in care for persons with dementia. Bold, optimistic, and innovative, Basting's cultural critique of dementia care offers a vision for how we can change the way we think about and care for people with memory loss.
Contents
Preface
Introduction: Dementia Is Hard, but It Needn't Be This Hard
Part One: Understanding Our Fears about Dementia
1. What Is (and Isn't) Memory? How a Better Understanding of Memory Might Ease Our Fears about Its Loss
2. The Danger of Stories: How Stereotypes and the Stigma of Aging and Dementia Can Hurt Us
Part Two: The Stories We Tell About Dementia in Popular Culture
3. Memory Loss in the Mainstream: Tightly Told Tragedies of Dementia with Science as Hero
4. Tightly Told Tragedies of Dementia: Then versus Now
5. Not So Tightly Tragic: Stories That Imagine Something More
6. Not Tragic at All: Stories about Memory Loss without the Old
7. All of the Above: Denny Crane as the Clown of Dementia
Part Three: Moving Through Fear: Stories about Dementia that Inspire Hope
8. StoryCorps and the Memory Loss Initiative
9. Memory Bridge
10. To Whom I May Concern
11. TimeSlips Creative Storytelling Project
12. Songwriting Works
13. Dance: "Respect" and "Sea of Heartbreak"
14. The Visual Arts
15. Duplex Planet: The Art of Conversation
16. The Photography of Wing Young Huie
17. Autobiographies by People with Dementia
Conclusion: How and Why to Move through Our Fears about Dementia
Appendixes
A. Program Description and Contact Information
B. Recipes from Chapter 1
C. Images and Stories of Dementia
D. Timeline of Stories and Events in the Recent History of Dementia
Notes
Index
