This perspective is in line with John Wiltshire’s particular emphasis on dementia as disrupting the pathographer’s meaning of life, which he developed, in the year 2000, against an aesthetic analysis of two narratives that take the caregiver’s point of view. From the vantage point of two decades’ distance, the phenomena of exchange and circulation are perhaps most tangibly reflected in the numeric imbalance between caregiver and patient narratives from the condition’s earliest appearance in book-length accounts: the patient is the told-about entity of care. 4Ĭohen undertook his field research in India in the decade between 19, when patient life-writing was still in its infancy. To illustrate his point, the ethnographer specifically referred to the ‘voice’ and ‘action’ of the patient Janet Adkins, who in 1990 ended her life with the help of the euthanasia activist Jack Kevorkian – a case that was broadly covered by the media. 3 Moreover, he argued that the general public appreciated a patient’s personhood and subjectivity only in her/his choice to alleviate the caregiver’s (in Cohen’s phraseology, the caretaker’s) burden. Second, it involves a circulation: of legitimate suffering, between diseased and care-giving bodies.Ĭohen notes an ‘exchange of symptoms – the body of the caretaker for the body of the Alzheimer’s patient’, and observes how families were seen as being victimised by patients and their care. In 1998, Lawrence Cohen identified the practical knowledge of Alzheimer’s disease in the American and Western European context to be organised around two manoeuvres:įirst, it involves an iteration of its pathology as opposed to its normality, despite the lack of a cure. The fullness of who I once was will be seen in the simplicity of who I am within, surrounded by layer upon layer of memories. I can still think, talk, walk, write and do almost anything I want. I am just not like most of the Alzheimer’s patients I read about. I could not see where any of it applied to me. There was a lot of good information there, but it was mostly for caregivers.

The 36-hour Day was about the best one I read.

Thomas debaggio losing my mind