Dementia (Continued from page 15)
Is it even more embarrassing than a sexual disease?” A client whose mother died within a week of her residency
in an Alzheimer’s Unit in an assisted living facility due to a medication error had this to say about the suggestion that her mother was better off:
One of Mom’s friends said she was better off anyway
to have died. That outraged me. Would someone say that if the medical profession had failed someone who had lymphoma, had heart failure, was going blind or deaf, had multiple sclerosis? We are a society that is very intolerant of anyone with
any mental disabilities, progressive or not. The thought is “that person makes me uncomfortable and I don’t know how to act. They aren’t contributing to society and, thus, would be better off dead.” Look at John Nash, played by Russell Crowe in A BEAUTIFUL MIND.1
Nash was a paranoid
schizophrenic, yet won the Nobel Prize in Economics. He was very “deranged”, but made an astounding contribution to society.
In The Myth of Alzheimer’s: What You Aren’t Being Told About
Today’s Most Dreaded Diagnosis, Peter J. Whitehouse, M.D., Ph.D., and Daniel George challenge the historic and “all-too- tragic and reductionistic narrative” that medical professionals and the media have told to a terrified public for decades about Alzheimer’s.2
They suggest “that both our perspective on brain
aging and how we treat patients might be less distressing if we could give persons and their families the choice to see AD (Al- zheimer’s disease) not as a loss of self wrought by a disease, but as a change in self that is not so unlike many others a person un- dergoes in various other life stages; not as a war, but as a natural stage of life that introduces challenges and offers opportunities for families to grow closer as they recognize the interdependency with others and embrace the opportunity for closeness in the face of cognitive loss.” They urge, compellingly, that:
1
A BEAUTIFUL MIND, by Sylvia Nasar, is the unauthorized biography of Nobel Prize-winning economist and mathematician John Forbes Nash. It inspired the 2001 film by the same name. It covers Nash’s youth, years at Princeton and MIT, and his struggle, and that of his family, due to his schizophrenia. In TOUCHED WITH FIRE: MANIC-DEPRESSIVE ILLNESS AND THE ARTISTIC TEMPERAMENT (1993), Kay Redfield Jamison, Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, and bipolar disorder sufferer herself, describes many famous persons who have suffered from mental illness, including Lord Byron. Some of the world’s greatest achiev- ers have been troubled by mental illness. Ludwig Von Beethoven wrote many of his greatest works during times of psychotic delu- sion. Abraham Lincoln suffered from suicidal depression. Sir Isaac Newtown suffered many breakdowns, but was knighted for his scientific contributions.
Winter 2009
The effects of dementia do damage the awareness of one’s identity and can be serious, troubling, and tragic. People may eventually lose some of their essential qualities, like communication. But these alterations in personhood give us little grounds for saying that an identity has been destroyed or lost, and certainly don’t provide justification for ceasing to understand, engage, and include them in our own minds or in our society. Dementia changes selfhood but it does not erase it all together or create non-persons who are shells of themselves. As Tom Kitwood, a pioneer in dementia care, once wrote, the perceived loss of self is not linked exclusively to the progress of the disease, but results from us projecting hopelessness and confusion onto people with dementia and failing to take time to engage them, understand their needs, perceive aging as part of the human condition, and reintegrate aging persons into our lives.3
In his book, What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Al-
zheimer’s Disease: The Complete Guide to Preventing, Treating, and Coping with Memory Loss, (G. Devi, M.D. Warner Books
2 3
Id. at 24. Id. at 25 (emphasis added).
MARYLAND ASSOCIATION FOR JUSTICE, Inc. Presents
MOCK TRIAL
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Trial Reporter
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