Author: Julian C. Hughes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199570663
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Dementia affects millions of people throughout the world. 'Thinking Through Dementia' offers a critique of the main models used to understand dementia. It discusses clinical issues and cases, together with philosophical work that might help us to better understand and treat this illness.

Author: Annette Leibing
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813538033
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Cultural responses to most illnesses differ; dementia is no exception. These responses, together with a society's attitudes toward its elderly population, affect the frequency of dementia-related diagnoses and the nature of treatment. Bringing together essays by nineteen respected scholars, this unique volume approaches the subject from a variety of angles, exploring the historical, psychological, and philosophical implications of dementia. Based on solid ethnographic fieldwork, the essays employ a cross-cultural perspective and focus on questions of age, mind, voice, self, loss, temporality, memory, and affect. Taken together, the essays make four important and interrelated contributions to our understanding of the mental status of the elderly. First, cross-cultural data show the extent to which the aging process, while biologically influenced, is also very much culturally constructed. Second, detailed ethnographic reports raise questions about the behavioral criteria used by health care professionals and laymen for defining the elderly as demented. Third, case studies show how a diagnosis affects a patient's treatment in both clinical and familial settings.; Finally, the collection highlights the gap that separates current biological understandings of aging from its cultural meanings. As Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia continue to command an ever-increasing amount of attention in medicine and psychology, this book will be essential reading for anthropologists, social scientists, and health care professionals.

Author: Julian C. Hughes
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191019844
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
With a rapidly expanding elderly population, there has been a marked increase in the incidence of dementia, and this dreadful, debilitating illness now affects - directly or indirectly - millions of people across the world. Dementia throws up a number of particular clinical, ethical, and conceptual problems, which mostly reflect complicated evaluative decisions, for instance about diagnosis and the distinction between normal and abnormal ageing. Different disciplines approach dementia in different ways - thus there are disease, cognitive neuropsychology, and social constructivist models of dementia, Underlying these models and approaches, each of which is clinically useful, are various and differing conceptual committments. These models carry ethical implications concerning how we ought to treat people suffereing from dementia. Thinking through Dementia offers a critique of the main models used to understand dementia-the biomedical, neuropsychological, and social constructionist. It discusses both clinical issues and cases, together with philosophical work that might help us better understand and treat this illness. Drawing on philosophical critique of models of dementia, as well as empirical data and clinical experience, the book unifies the biological, psychological, and social accounts of illness and disease. Highly original and thought provoking, this book will interest psychiatrists, philosophers, psychologists, and anyone involved in the care and management of those with dementia.

Author: Albert Jewell
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
ISBN: 1849051542
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Offering an inter-disciplinary approach to spirituality and personhood in dementia care, the contributors to this book are leading practitioners and researchers in the field. They provide both a theoretical structure and a practical understanding of the essential role that spirituality can play in the affirmation of personhood and identity.

Author: Hilary Lee
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 023034450X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
A practical introduction to the use of the arts in dementia care. Based on experience, the book provides clear guidance on how to employ a variety of innovative techniques including art, music and dance therapies, to promote the physical, psychological, emotional, social and spiritual well-being of people with dementia.

Author: Joanna Collicutt
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780857464910
Category : Church work with nursing home patients
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Thinking of You is a comprehensive introduction to the subject of dementia. This accessible book is a practical resource for those directly affected by the condition, their immediate family and carers, and those seeking to offer them pastoral care and encourage continuing spiritual growth. Importantly, the author addresses the spiritual care of the affected individual and how to help churches support them and their carers. The final section includes resources for ministry in residential care homes.

Author: Chris Graham
Publisher: Sphere
ISBN: 0751565423
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
This story poses a profound question - do we accept the hand that fate deals us, or do we battle to make the most of the life we have and help others in the process? Chris Graham, just 38 years old but already facing the advanced stages of Alzheimer's disease, has emphatically chosen the latter. Having lived through a troubled childhood, Chris joined the British Army at a young age and found that the life of a soldier provided him with a much-needed sense of stability. However, his world was turned upside down when, at just 34 years of age, he was diagnosed with a form of early onset dementia. This brutal disease had already claimed the life of his father at 42, along with several other members of his family, and tragically had already confined his brother to a nursing home at the age of 43. In his brother's life, Chris could see a terrifying window into his own near future. Chris, though, is an extraordinary human being. Having been handed nothing less than a death sentence, he decided overnight to stand up to this horrendous disease and do something to leave his mark before it was too late. And so it was that last year, Chris embarked on an awareness-raising 16,000-mile solo cycle around North America, armed only with his bike, a sense of humour, and some good old-fashioned British grit. Leaving his ever-supportive wife Vicky and baby son Dexter at home, he took on huge challenges - for instance, the fear that the ability to discern left from right might leave him at any point while navigating an entire continent - and made it home in time for Christmas, determined to spending however long he has left pouring his love and attention into his family life. Five Minutes of Amazing is both the story of Chris' epic journey and of his fight against the disease increasingly being recognised as the defining disease of our generation. Inspiring and heart-rending in equal measure, it's as important as it is moving, and it will touch everyone who reads it.

Author: John Swinton
Publisher: SCM Press
ISBN: 0334049644
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Winner of the Michael Ramsay Prize 2016 Dementia is one of the most feared diseases in Western society today. Some have even gone so far as to suggest euthanasia as a solution to the perceived indignity of memory loss and the disorientation that accompanies it. Here, John Swinton develops a practical theology of dementia for caregivers, people with dementia, ministers, hospital chaplains, and medical practitioners as he explores two primary questions: • Who am I when I’ve forgotten who I am? • What does it mean to love God and be loved by God when I have forgotten who God is? Offering compassionate and carefully considered theological and pastoral responses to dementia and forgetfulness, Swinton’s Dementia redefines dementia in light of the transformative counter story that is the gospel.

Author: Oliver James
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1407028871
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Dementia is a little understood and currently incurable illness, but much can be done to maximise the quality of life for people with the condition. Contented Dementia - by clinical psychologist and bestselling author Oliver James - outlines a groundbreaking and practical method for managing dementia that will allow both sufferer and carer to maintain the highest possible quality of life, throughout every stage of the illness. A person with dementia will experience random and increasingly frequent memory blanks relating to recent events. Feelings, however, remain intact, as do memories of past events and both can be used in a special way to substitute for more recent information that has been lost. The SPECAL method (Specialized Early Care for Alzheimer's) outlined in this book works by creating links between past memories and the routine activities of daily life in the present. Drawing on real-life examples and user-friendly tried-and-tested methods, Contented Dementia provides essential information and guidance for carers, relatives and professionals.

Author: Lynn Casteel Harper
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1948226294
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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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.