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Actors (and artists) have a particular talent for communicating with people with dementia. I think this stems from a quality of attention, concentration, perhaps ability to be still, in the moment, filtering out all other distractions and claims on attention. This is necessary for acting and all artistic endeavour, and may help to explain why the arts are so effective in promoting communication with people with dementia. The challenge is to enable care staff to achieve this level of connection too, and help them to see the potential of the people they look after.
Sue Benson, editor of Journal of Dementia Care in Ladder to the Moon: interactive theatre in care settings Journal of Dementia Care 17(4) 20-23
It is important not to assume that people with Alzheimers Disease have lost understanding or knowledge. It is too easy to think that they do not know simply because they do not communicate. We need to take on the challenge of finding ways to communicate successfully, to try different routes to find common ground.
Professor Trevor Harley, University of Dundee
We forget that life can only be defined in the present tense; it is, and it is now ... and that nowness becomes so vivid to me that I am almost serene. Below my window the blossom is out in full. And it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that could ever be. And I can see it; and things are both more trivial than they ever were and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important does not seem to matter. But the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous.
Dennis Potter, playwright 1994 (shortly before his death)
People with dementia very often seem to see more than we do, to see through things, round things, past things. Their senses appear at times to be differently deployed so that they hear smells, see voices, taste pictures. They use metaphor as we might use observation, their linguistic range, which to us without dementia may appear very strangely configured, is also fluid, generously, even lavishly, overlaid with imagery, freed from grammatical or chronological rules. It is already poetic in essence.
Karen Hayes from The Landscape of Dementia (unpublished)
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind its faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.
Albert Einstein
I have seen deeply demented patients weep or shiver as they listen to music they have never heard before, and I think they can experience the entire range of feelings the rest of us can, and that dementia, at least at these times, is no bar to emotional depth. Once one has seen such responses, one knows that there is still a self to be called upon, even if music, and only music, can do the calling.
Oliver Sacks (2007) Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
New York: Knopf (p.346)
His function was to arouse confidence and to be receptive, to listen patiently and lovingly, helping the imperfectly formed confession to take shape, inviting all that was dammed up or encrusted within each soul to flow and pour out. When it did, he received it and wrapped it in silence.
Herman Hesse (1973) The Glass Bead Game Penguin p. 457
Forgetting has become part of who Daddy is, so I decide to try to honor his forgetfulness. I try to love it. It defines his being these days, and sometimes I feel that to see him I have to look through it, a shuttered window. Underneath the forgetting lie a few remembered things, shoelaces, the way to hold a razor to shave, song-lyrics he recalls, like cockles and mussels - but you have to catch them at the right moment of the day, when they shine through the slats. Daddy is Daddy now because he forgets.
Cohen E (2003) The House on Beartown Road: A Memoir of Learning and Forgetting London: Vermillion (p.196-7)
A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibilities, moral being --- matters of which neuropsychology cannot speak. And it is here, beyond the realm of an impersonal psychology, that you may find ways to touch him, and change him.
Luria AR From a personal letter to Oliver Sacks quoted in his 1985 book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat London: Picador (p.32)
Humour … has considerable merit in providing a means of access to otherwise inaccessible territory. As well, its power to transform the moment is too vital to be ignored.
Dean R (2003) Death, Humor and Spirituality: Strange Bedfellows? In GR Cox et al Making Sense of Death: Spiritual, Pastoral and Personal Aspects of Death, Dying and Bereavement New York: Baywood Publishing Co Inc (p.80)
A new form of hospice for patients with advanced [dementia] would revolve around the concept of 'being with' rather than 'doing to' patients ..., even if they have some years to live. ... Efforts to enhance emotional, relational, and esthetic well-being would, under such a plan, be enhanced in ways that involve family members, providing them with a sense of meaning and purpose. Through music, movement therapy, relaxation, and touch, such efforts support patients' remaining capacities. Connections with nature through a beautiful and open environment fit under this rubric, as can spiritual support.
Stephen G Post (2000)
The Moral Challenge of Alzheimer Disease: Ethical Issues from Diagnosis to Dying (2ndedition)
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University.
Quoted by J Hughes (2006) Beyond hypercognitivism: a philosophical basis for good quality palliative care in dementia
Les Cahiers de la Fondation Mederic Alzheimer 2 (June) 17-23 (p.18)
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