Dear Friends,
Many thanks to those who have written to me about last month’s topic, Resilience. And in response to our reviews of Wendy Mitchell’s two books on Dementia.
It’s always been my intention that Dementia Marathon readers would be a vital part of our project and play a major role in its development. So, please keep the comments and contributions coming. Your thoughts on this are greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Inevitably, most of the conversation comes from my end and of course, Kerry and myself initiated our project.
Some personal history …
One of the roles I most enjoyed in my working life before retirement was in academic staff development. What’s that? I hear you ask.
Since I’ve moved to Carlton to live in a retirement community, several people have asked me what I used to do.
On one - memorable to me - occasion, when I tried to explain academic staff development by citing the then name of the unit I worked in, I was met with a spontaneous response something like, ‘O Gawd, these dreadful people who try to show us how to teach!’
I hastened to stress that was NOT the way I personally worked. For me, academic staff development has always been a collaborative, peer-to-peer effort.
You, as an academic, may have a problem you would like help with.
More likely, and more to my taste, you have an area of expertise that you would like to make even better; I have the skills and expertise to add to yours. Together we can raise the level of academic endeavour.
I could see by the way my companion’s eyes were glazing over that my explanation of what I used to do was landing on deaf ears and the subject was rapidly changed!
As I reflected on what, to me, was a very negative experience, I realised that perhaps something similar was going on in the field of dementia.
We all know it can be the elephant in the room, that there is a definite stigma attached to being recognised as having dementia. This is the perception that Wendy Mitchell has fought so hard to counteract.
And I could feel that sense of stigma in my companion’s reaction to my explanation of what I had done in a previous life. And I can tell you, it wasn’t fun! It seemed to me, and I may be wrong, that there was a pecking order here. The ‘real’ academics were at the top and a long way down the rungs were people like myself who mistakenly thought they could play a role in improving the ‘real’ academics’ performance.
As a happier ending to this tale of disappointment, the person in question seems to have decided that, despite my questionable antecedents, I am still someone worth talking to. So all is not lost.
The moral of this story?
I’m not sure.
One moral could be that however ‘advanced’ we become as humans, we will always have this tendency to ‘sort’ people in ways that stigmatise those we perceive as the less fortunate. We can certainly see instances of this all around us.
Another moral - and one that I personally find more attractive - is to ‘do a Wendy Mitchell’ and just be yourself whatever the circumstances.
I’m curious as to how others address the challenges of being a witness to a dementia diagnosis? As the spouse, partner, friend or just ‘neighbour’ of the one diagnosed, how does this affect you?
Over to you …
Till next time,