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3:09am June 1, 2014
Anonymous asked: you talk about ethics and ableism a lot and i'm generally kind of new to reading on both areas. do you know of any reading material you'd recommend relating to dementia? someone in my family has it and other family members have been pretty gross about it and idk. i just feel like i need to read SOMEBODY talking about this stuff who isn't a doctor talking like they're discussing a laboratory animal subject instead of a living, breathing person

I really wish I did know much.  Unfortunately, while I have a fair bit of personal experience around dementia, I don’t know a lot of good reading material that isn’t extremely ableist.  I’ve looked for it myself, because dementia is an interest of mine:  Specifically, the way that I always see, plainly, way more going on in the heads of people with dementia than other people do.  They’re just often operating much slower or at a different wavelength almost, but they’re there.  And everyone else always seems to see them as absent from the room.  The closest thing I can even think of, and it’s not much, is “In The Hearts: Inspirational Alzheimer’s Stories” by Mary Margaret Britton Yearwood.  She’s an autistic woman I used to know online, and she was a chaplain in a dementia ward.  Despite the ‘inspirational’ title of the book, she did her best to show that people with dementia still had their souls intact and that this made it beautiful to work with them, not horrible.  But I’m not sure if that’s what you’re looking for or not.  I know that her autism made it easier for her to relate to people with dementia, and I’ve found the same thing, although not all autistic people find it easier.  (She and I both have forms of autism where it at least makes sense that it could happen that way.)  You could do worse than find a copy of her book, but I’m not sure if it would give you what you’re looking for or not.  Certainly she saw all of her patients as human beings and struggled to convey that to people who saw them as little more than 'vegetables’.  (I hate that word.)

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  1. withasmoothroundstone posted this