Care as a creative practice: comics, dementia and graphic medicine

Abstract

Care paves efficient ways to sustain life during illness, nonetheless, caring for a chronically ill person is a hard, demanding, tedious and unglamorous work, often fraught with challenges. In contrast, creativity refers to a generative process that brings something new into existence. For instance, creativity implies a moment of discovery, the birth of new ideas, crossing existing boundaries among others. Perfusing creativity with care practices mitigates the difficult experiences, and aid in the healthy management of challenges put forth by the illness. The present article after elaborating on how creativity transforms care as a meaningful and constructive life-changing practice in the context of one of the chronic illnesses, dementia/AD, and briefing on graphic medicine—an interdisciplinary field of healthcare and comics, seeks to close-read Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass to demonstrate how care as creative practice provides a therapeutic direction when biomedical cure becomes impossible. The article investigates how such distinctive caring practices challenges the predominant perspective of dementia as a social death and aid in finding meaning in the alternative experiential realities of the person living with dementia. Further, the article also examines how these practices help in retaining the personhood and humanity of the care-receiver.