Beyond Loss

Coming to terms with dementia is one of the great challenges of our time. This volume of new interdisciplinary essays by internationally established scholars offers new ways of understanding and dealing with it. It explores views of dementia that go beyond the idea of loss, and rather envisions it as multilayered transformation and change of personhood and identity, and as development that mostly is socially shared with others. The studies collected here identify new empirical, theoretical, and methodological areas that will be crucial to future research and clinical practice concerned with age-related dementia. Three general themes are singled out as of particular importance and interest: persons and personhood, identity and agency, and the social and the communal.Hyden, Lindemann, Brockmeier: Beyond Loss - Introduction ; Part I: Persons, Personhood, and Dignity ; 1. Hilde Lindemann: Second Nature and the Tragedy of Alzheimer's ; 2. Steven R. Sabat: The Person with Dementia as Understood Through Stern's Critical Personalism ; 3. Lennart Nordenfelt: Dignity and Dementia ; 4. Ingrid Hellstrom: 'I'm his wife not his carer!' - Dignity and couplehood in dementia that the relationship>" ; Part II: Identity, Agency, Embodiment ; 5. Jens Brockmeier: Questions of Meaning: Identity, Memory, and Dementia ; 6. Maria I. Medved: Everyday dramas: Comparing life with dementia and acquired brain injury ; 7. Pia Kontos: Body and Self in Dementia ; 8. Alison Phinney: As the Body Speaks: Creative Activity in Dementia ; Part III: Communication, Family, and Institutions ; 9. Lars C. Hyden: Narrative collaboration and scaffolding in dementia ; 10. Camilla Lindholm: Supporting a Co-Conversationalist with Dementia: The Case of Questions ; 11. Pamela Roach, John Keady & Penny Bee: 'Familyhood' and Early Onset Dementia: Using Narrative and Biography to plot Longitudinal Adjustment to the Diagnosis ; 12. Linda Orulv: In Battle with Time: Agency and Control in a Self-Help Group for Persons with Dementia