Awareness and Advocacy

9 items
Posted: November 17, 2022

Grappling with the concept of “aggressive behavior” among people with dementia

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Description ‘Aggressive behavior among dementia patients’ is seen as a major concern in nursing homes because of its stressful impact on caregivers. Geriatric-medicine literature defines ‘aggressive behavior’ as hitting, kicking, and screaming. Caregivers are advised to ‘manage’ this ‘behavior’ through a variety of strategies: identifying and removing environmental triggers, behavior modification, reassurance and distraction, and… Read more »

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Posted: November 17, 2022

“Power, Agency, Aging, and Cognitive Impairment: The Stories of Two Women”

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Abstract All of us get old if we are lucky, and disability is a natural part of human variation across the lifespan. Early in her life, Susan* was labelled with developmental disability but, unlike many other disabled people who were born during the mid-twentieth century, she grew up within her family, not in an institution…. Read more »

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Posted: November 17, 2022

Non-institutional alternatives to nursing homes already exist

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Description Most Canadians who died of Covid-19 lived in nursing homes. Their deaths renewed calls for nursing-home reform. These institutions are the last resort when home care fails to deliver and family caregivers become overwhelmed. Since infections spread quickly in large institutions, why not replace them with non-profit, community-based alternatives? These have a long track… Read more »

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Posted: November 17, 2022

Preventing the institutionalization of people with dementia and Assessing an assisted-living or long-term care institution

Margaret Oldfield
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Abstract In a 2021 poll by the National Institute on Aging, 97% of Canadian seniors said they did not want to live in a long-term-care facility (a nursing home). Many long-term-care residents do not need to be in institutions, whose numerous drawbacks were exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Residents are there because they cannot receive… Read more »

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Posted: December 7, 2021

Separate and Unequal: A Time to Reimagine Dementia

Pia Kontos

Launched amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Reimagining Dementia: A Creative Coalition for Justice is committed to shifting the culture of dementia care from centralized control, safety, isolation, and punitive interventions to a culture of inclusion, creativity, justice, and respect. “Drawing on the emancipatory power of the imagination with the arts (e.g., theatre, improvisation, music), and grounded… Read more »

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Posted: November 22, 2021

The Neuropsychiatric Biopolitics of Dementia and its Ethnicity Problem

Maria Zubair
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Abstract Sociological analyses of dementia have long drawn on critiques of medicalisation and the medical model. This approach fails to account for late 20th/early 21st century expansion of neuropsychiatric biopolitics, wherein a more subtle and pervasive (self-)governance of health, illness, and life itself is at stake. Since the 1970s, new neuropsychiatric imaginings of dementia have… Read more »

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Posted: November 22, 2021

Positioning ethnicity in dementia awareness research: does the use of senility risk ascribing racialised knowledge deficits to minority groups?

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Abstract Over recent decades, the importance of increasing dementia awareness has been promoted by charities, researchers and governments. In response, a large body of research has emerged that evaluates the awareness of different populations. One such population are minority ethnic communities. Associated studies typically conclude that minority ethnic groups have a poor awareness of dementia… Read more »

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