Andrea Capstick

Behind the stiff upper lip: war narratives of older men with dementia.

Abstract The concept of the stiff upper lip stands as a cultural metaphor for the repression and figurative ‘biting back’ of traumatic experience, particularly in military contexts. For men born in the first half of the twentieth century, maintaining a stiff upper lip involved the ability to exert high levels of cognitive control over the subjective, visceral, and emotional domains of experience. In the most common forms of dementia, which affect at least one in five men now in their 80s and 90s, this cognitive control is increasingly lost. One result is that, with the onset of dementia, men who have in the intervening years maintained a relative silence about their wartime experiences begin to disclose detailed memories of such events, in some cases for the first time. This article draws on narrative biographical data from three men with late-onset dementia who make extensive reference to their experience of war. The narratives of Sid, Leonard, and Nelson are used to explore aspects of collective memory of the two World Wars, and the socially constructed masculinities imposed on men who grew up and came of age during those decades. The findings show that in spite of their difficulties with short-term memory, people with dementia can contribute rich data to cultural studies research. Some aspects of the narratives discussed here may also be considered to work along the line of the counter-hegemonic, offering insights into lived experiences of war that have been elided in popular culture in the post-War years.

Challenging representations of dementia in contemporary western fiction

Fiction film is one of the most influential vehicles for the popularization of dementia. It is likely to have a particular influence on the way dementia is constructed by society at large, not least due to its consumption in the guise of entertainment. In this paper, we will argue that such popularization is rarely innocent or unproblematic. Representations of people with dementia in film tend to draw heavily on familiar tropes such as global memory loss, violence and aggression, extreme dependency on heroic carers, catastrophic prognosis, and early death. Audiences may therefore uncritically absorb discourses which reinforce negative stereotypes and perpetuate the biomedical orthodoxy that everything a person with dementia says or does is ‘a symptom of the disease.’

Broadening the debate on creativity and dementia : A critical approach

In recent years there has been a growing interest in person-centred, ‘living well’ approaches to dementia, often taking the form of important efforts to engage people with dementia in a range of creative, arts-based interventions such as dance, drama, music, art and poetry. Such practices have been advanced as socially inclusive activities that help to affirm personhood and redress the biomedical focus on loss and deficit. However, in emphasizing more traditional forms of creativity associated with the arts, more mundane forms of creativity that emerge in everyday life have been overlooked, specifically with regard to how such creativity is used by people living with dementia and by their carers and family members as a way of negotiating changes in their everyday lives. In this paper, we propose a critical approach to understanding such forms of creativity in this context, comprised of six dimensions: everyday creativity; power relations; ways to operationalise creativity; sensory and affective experience; difference; and reciprocity. We point towards the potential of these dimensions to contribute to a reframing of debates around creativity and dementia.

The influence of subliminal crosstalk in dementia narratives

Ethnographic audio-visual research data recorded in a busy dementia care environment were initially considered to be ‘contaminated’ by unwanted background noise. This included a variety of elements: ambient sound, mechanical noise, non-narrative vocalisation and narrative fragments from parallel conversation. Using the methodological lens of conversation analysis, we present an exploration of the striking temporal and sequential resonances between the narrative of one man with dementia and a group of care staff holding a separate conversation some distance away. We suggest that in this and similar settings, where random and intrusive background sounds and conversation form a ubiquitous backdrop, the presence of such ‘noise’ can have a detectable influence on the content and direction of situated narratives. We argue that rather than attempting to filter out these apparently intrusive sounds from micro-interactional data, interference elements can usefully be incorporated into the analysis of interactions.