Cultural Dementia PDF Download

Author: David Andress
Publisher: Apollo
ISBN: 1788540050
Category : Civilization, Western
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this blistering book, David Andress shows how the West has abandoned its history and lost its memory. The former great powers of the historic 'West' have abandoned themselves to senile daydreams of recovered youth. They have stirred up old hatreds given disturbing voice to destructive rage, and risked the collapse of their capacity for decisive, effective and just government. At the core of this is an abandonment of political attention to history, understood as a clear empirical grounding in how we reached our present condition. In Britain, France and the U.S., historical stories are deployed in public debate as little more than dangerous fantasies.

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: Bianca Brijnath
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782383557
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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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.

Author: Gwen Yeo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317822587
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A practical approach for professionals working with people suffering from dementias, this book focuses on dementias, including Alzheimer's disease, from a multi-cultural perspective.

Author: Irmela Marei Krüger-Fürhoff
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110713705
Category : Social Science
Languages : de
Pages : 246

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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.

Author: Annette Leibing
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789209102
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
The conceptualization of dementia has changed dramatically in recent years with the claim that, through early detection and by controlling several risk factors, a prevention of dementia is possible. Although encouraging and providing hope against this feared condition, this claim is open to scrutiny. This volume looks at how this new conceptualization ignores many of the factors which influence a dementia sufferers’ prognosis, including their history with education, food and exercise as well as their living in different epistemic cultures. The central aim is to question the concept of prevention and analyze its impact on aging people and aging societies.

Author: Julia Botsford
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
ISBN: 0857008811
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
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.

Author: Tia Powell
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735210918
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Now in paperback, the cultural and medical history of dementia and Alzheimer's disease by a leading psychiatrist and bioethicist who urges us to turn our focus from cure to care. Despite being a physician and a bioethicist, Tia Powell wasn't prepared to address the challenges she faced when her grandmother, and then her mother, were diagnosed with dementia--not to mention confronting the hard truth that her own odds aren't great. In the U.S., 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day; by the time a person reaches 85, their chances of having dementia approach 50 percent. And the truth is, there is no cure, and none coming soon, despite the perpetual promises by pharmaceutical companies that they are just one more expensive study away from a pill. Dr. Powell's goal is to move the conversation away from an exclusive focus on cure to a genuine appreciation of care--what we can do for those who have dementia, and how to keep life meaningful and even joyful. Reimagining Dementia is a moving combination of medicine and memoir, peeling back the untold history of dementia, from the story of Solomon Fuller, a black doctor whose research at the turn of the twentieth century anticipated important aspects of what we know about dementia today, to what has been gained and lost with the recent bonanza of funding for Alzheimer's at the expense of other forms of the disease. In demystifying dementia, Dr. Powell helps us understand it with clearer eyes, from the point of view of both physician and caregiver. Ultimately, she wants us all to know that dementia is not only about loss--it's also about the preservation of dignity and hope.

Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309175569
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Older Americans, even the oldest, can now expect to live years longer than those who reached the same ages even a few decades ago. Although survival has improved for all racial and ethnic groups, strong differences persist, both in life expectancy and in the causes of disability and death at older ages. This book examines trends in mortality rates and selected causes of disability (cardiovascular disease, dementia) for older people of different racial and ethnic groups. The determinants of these trends and differences are also investigated, including differences in access to health care and experiences in early life, diet, health behaviors, genetic background, social class, wealth and income. Groups often neglected in analyses of national data, such as the elderly Hispanic and Asian Americans of different origin and immigrant generations, are compared. The volume provides understanding of research bearing on the health status and survival of the fastest-growing segment of the American population.

Author: Bernardino Ghetti
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030511405
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Under the name of Frontotemporal Dementias (FTD) numerous hereditary and sporadic disorders are listed. FTD may take away speech and language, social skills and ethical judgement, wishes and will, empathy and emotions; it may also impair motor functions. FTD may affect men and women in midlife or during old age leading to the demolition of the uniqueness of the human mind. In the last decade of the 20th century and in the first two decades of the 21st century, progress in the understanding of clinical, neuropathological, biochemical, and genetic aspects of FTD has accelerated. The novel awareness about FTD has directed young generations of researchers toward the study of this complex group of disorders. This Volume has been formulated with the participation of some of the leading scientists who have contributed to the development of knowledge in the clinical and basic science arenas. It captures the current central elements that are relevant to an up-to-date understanding of causes and pathogenesis of multiple forms of FTD. The volume is an opus that represents a distillation of the work of many scientists and addresses the current directions in the study of one of the most complex groups of diseases. In view of its structure, the book could also be used as a textbook, that offers both a broad and deep analysis of major areas in FTD. This book, planned by the International Society for Frontotemporal Dementias, is distinctive as it opens a window to a wide landscape about the biology of FTD. Thus, the book represents a moment of reflection on the present state of our knowledge of FTD and a collective vision toward scientific progress. The authors of each chapter share their knowledge and vision aimed at reducing the suffering which is caused by FTD.