Abstract
Understanding dementia is a pressing social challenge. This article draws on the ‘Dementia talking: care conversation and communication’ project which aims to understand how talk about, and to people living with dementia is constructed. In this article I draw on the construction of dementia manifest in two data sets – a corpus of 350 recent UK national newspaper articles and qualitative data derived from in-depth interviews with informal carers. These data were analysed using a thematic discursive approach. A ‘panic-blame’ framework was evident in much of the print media coverage. Dementia was represented in catastrophic terms as a ‘tsunami’ and ‘worse than death’, juxtaposed with coverage of individualistic behavioural change and lifestyle recommendations to ‘stave off’ the condition. Contrary to this media discourse, in carers' talk there was scant use of hyperbolic metaphor or reference to individual responsibility for dementia, and any corresponding blame and accountability. I argue that the presence of individualistic dementia ‘preventative’ behaviour in media discourse is problematic, especially in comparison to other more ‘controllable’ and treatable chronic conditions. Engagement with, and critique of, the nascent panic-blame cultural context may be fruitful in enhancing positive social change for people diagnosed with dementia and their carers.
Highlights
Dementia is an increasingly common disease, which predominantly affects older people
Two discourses about dementia were identified – one related to notions of a dementia ‘epidemic’, the other health and lifestyle factors associated with the ‘prevention’ of dementia
The first discourse is underpinned by a biomedical ideology that firmly positions dementia as a disease and pathology not in any way connected to ‘normal’ ageing
Summary
Dementia is an increasingly common disease, which predominantly affects older people. In this article I argue that there are two predominant and paradoxical discursive representations of dementia These are encapsulated in the title of this article, which is taken from headlines in two British newspapers the Daily Mail (‘The living death of Alzheimer’s’, Revoir 2011) and the Express (‘Take a walk to keep dementia at bay’, Fletcher 2010). The latter discourse relates both to a current focus on ‘living well’ with dementia (Department of Health 2009) and growing biomedical emphasis on the vascular – and more ‘controllable’ – aspects of dementias, and is a logical extension of broader (western) liberal-humanistic discourses of self-responsibility for health and wellbeing (Lyons 2000). In line with the proliferation of self-responsibility discourses more generally, the boundaries with respect to the onset of dementia appear to be in flux and (certainly at the level of media representation) may – as I suggest though the following analysis – be foregrounding individual responsibility in new, and potentially troubling, ways
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