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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.
An extraordinary story demonstrating how the love between a dementia sufferer and her husband/caregiver sustained them even as the disease worked its way to its inevitable conclusion.
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.
This memoir shares the early, troubled years of the author's wife and transitions to their first meeting, relationship, and marriage. A woman with low self-esteem found courage, comfort, and support and dared to dream again. Friends and family often referred to their marriage as a romance meant to be. Frontotemporal Dementia, FTD, interrupted that love story. The author devotedly cared for his wife until her passing. He weaves in journals, letters, and posts and lays bare their life through her incurable disease. Throughout much of the book, the author offers dementia mileposts, tips, and observations to assist those struggling in their own journeys. While dementia will differ person to person, many will find similarities to their own experiences. The book serves two purposes as both an aid to those in a dementia care partner role but also as a love story.
Dementia is an urgent global concern, often termed a widespread ‘problem’, ‘tragedy’ or ‘burden’ and a subject best addressed by health and social policy and practice. However, creative writers can offer powerful and imaginative insights into the experience of dementia across cultures and over time. This cross-disciplinary volume explores how engaging with dementia through its myriad literary representations can help to deepen and humanise attitudes to people living with the condition. Offering and interrogating a wide array of perspectives about how dementia might be ‘imagined’, this book allows us to see how different ways of being can inflect one another. By drawing on the ‘lived’ experience of the individual unique person and their loved ones, literature can contribute to a deeper and more compassionate and more liberating attitude to a phenomenon that is both natural and unnatural. Novels, plays and stories reveal a rich panoply of responses ranging from the tragic to the comic, allowing us to understand that people with dementia often offer us models of humour, courage and resilience, and carers can also embody a range of responses from rigidity to compassion. Dementia and Literature problematises the subject of dementia, encouraging us all to question our own hegemonies critically and creatively. Drawing on literary studies, cultural studies, education, clinical psychology, psychiatry, nursing and gerontology, this book is a fascinating contribution to the emerging area of the medical and health humanities. The book will be of interest to those living with dementia and their caregivers as well as to the academic community and policy makers.
Taking its cues from both classical and post-classical narratologies, this study explores both forms and functions of the representation of dementia in Anglophone fictions. Initially, dementia is conceptualised as a narrative-epistemological paradox: The more those affected know what it is like to have dementia, the less they can tell about it. Narrative fiction is the only discourse that provides an imaginative glimpse at the subjective experience of dementia in language. The narratological modelling of four ‘narrative modes’ elaborates how the paradox becomes productive in fiction: Depending on the narrative perspective taken, but also on the type of narration, the technique for representing consciousness and the epistemic strategy of narrating dementia, the respective narrative modes come with different prerequisites and possibilities for narrating dementia. The analysis of four contemporary Anglophone dementia fictions based on the developed model reveals their potential functions: Fiction allows readers to learn about the challenges of dementia, grants them perspective-taking, it trains cognitive flexibility, and explores the meaning of memory, knowledge, narrative and imagination, and thus also offers trajectories of a cultural coping with dementia.
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.
This volume provides a comprehensive understanding of the biology of dementias, including information on advancements in the way these disorders are perceived and studied. From earlier assumptions that cognitive deficits were simply age related, this handbook progresses into complex discussions of the diseases that affect the cortex of the human brain. Clinicians will find extensive diagnostic and research perspectives on a variety of interesting topics, including neuropathology, physiopathology, biology, clinics, and imaging information on all, or most, of the dementing disorders currently known. In addition, chapters devoted to legal and ethical issues give practitioners and health care workers an informative view on complex dementias and the way these disorders affect patients and families. Clinicians in all levels of expertise will find useful and synthetic information. * Comprehensive information on advancements in the study and diagnosis of dementias * Complex discussions of the diseases that affect the cortex of the human brain* Extensive diagnostic and research perspectives on topics including, but not limited to, neuropathology, physiopathology, and groundbreaking imaging techniques* A reference guide that is appropriate for clinicians in all levels of expertise, from researchers to basic health care providers
This volume in the Blue Books of Neurology series provides you with rapid access to practical, clinical guidance on the diagnosis and treatment of all forms of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, Parkinson's disease, and many others. Organized by the most common neurodegenerative diseases, it reflects new insights regarding commonalities among the neurodegenerative diseases, and clusters them according to their dominant molecular pathologic signatures, so you can best treat any dementia you see. Differentiate among various forms of dementia and provide the appropriate management strategy. Correlate neuroimaging with neuropsychological testing to form more accurate diagnoses. Administer the latest approved drugs to improve your patients' brain function. A new two-color design and full-color images throughout helps you access information more easily. New chapters and new authors help you incorporate the latest information and fresh perspectives into your practice.
This book summarizes the research findings presented at the 2nd International Conference on Novel & Intelligent Digital Systems (NiDS 2022). NiDS 2022 was implemented virtually due to COVID-19 restrictions, on September 29-30, 2022, under the auspices of the Institute of Intelligent Systems. NiDS lays special emphasis on the novelties of intelligent systems and on the interdisciplinary research which enables, supports, and enhances artificial intelligence (AI) in software development. It promotes high-quality research, creating a forum for the exploration of challenges and new advances in AI, and addresses experts, researchers, and scholars in the fields of artificial and computational intelligence in systems and in computer sciences in general, enabling them to learn more about pertinent, strongly related, and mutually complementary fields. The conference promotes an exchange of ideas, reinforcing and expanding the network of researchers, academics, and market representatives.