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8:58am April 6, 2012

This is even worse than autism.

There are tons of books for caregivers of people with dementia, and tons of books by caregivers of people with dementia. It is much harder to find books by people with dementia, and even harder than that to find books for people with dementia. WTF.

And yes, plenty of people with dementia can read and write, and plenty of people who can’t read and write, can read and write with help from people and technology. So that’s not why. All I can say is if I ever get dementia (I mean the progressive kind, not tardive dementia/dysmentia) I hope that things will have changed by then because it would really suck to have to deal entirely with stuff written for caregivers because there’s so little other stuff out there. (And of course, stuff by caregivers can be really horrible to the actual person with dementia.)

It’s interesting (in a bad way) how often this pattern applies to cognitive disability: Autism, brain damage, intellectual disability, dementia, etc. And not because of the actual impairments. It’s how people think about cognitive disability.