Giving voice to the lived experiences of people with dementia across the globe, this text highlights the challenges presented as dementia care shifts to a community setting. Contributors address the social aspects of environment and, using a unique 'neighbourhood-centred’ perspective, provide an innovative guide for policy and practice.

A diagnosis of dementia changes the ways people engage with each other – for those living with dementia, as well their families, caregivers, friends, health professionals, neighbours, shopkeepers and the community. Medical understandings, necessary as they are, provide no insights into how we may all live good lives with dementia. This innovative volume brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners to focus on dementia as lived experience. It foregrounds dementia’s social, moral, political and economic dimensions, investigating the challenges of reframing the dementia experience for all involved. Part I critiques the stigmas, the negativity, language and fears often associated with a dementia diagnosis, challenging debilitating representations and examining ways to tackle these. Part II examines proactive practices that can support better long-term outcomes for those living with dementia. Part III looks at the relational aspects of dementia care, acknowledging and going beyond the notion of person-centred care. Collectively, these contributions highlight the social and relational change required to enhance life for those with dementia and those who care for them. Engaging in a critical conversation around personhood and social value, this book examines the wider social contexts within which dementia care takes place. It calls for social change, and looks for inspiration to the growing movement for relational care and the caring society. Dementia as Social Experience is important reading for all those people who, in various ways, are living with dementia, as well as for those working in this area as clinicians, researcher and carers.

“This book holds the story of a monumental research effort… It provides a moving, thoughtful, understanding of what “neighbourhood” means and is a beacon for efforts aimed at improving the quality of life of all involved.” Steven R. Sabat, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Georgetown University, Washington D.C., USA “It is indicative reading for educators, researchers, clinicians and policy makers nationally and internationally. By grounding the underpinning research in the lived experience of people with dementia, the book’s appeal extends to voluntary and community groups. Reading it is a must!” Assumpta Ryan, Professor of Ageing and Health, Ulster University, UK “A remarkable contribution to the ‘Reconsidering Dementia’ series.” Bob Woods, Emeritus Professor, Bangor University, UK This book provides research based insights into the lived experience of dementia, aging in place and the use of participatory and creative social research approaches in the field of dementia studies. For the first time the key findings of one of the UKs largest funded social science research projects, the Neighbourhoods study, are assembled into one accessibly written blueprint for dementia care aiding better understanding of the place and position of those living with dementia in the home and neighbourhood context. Reconsidering Neighbourhoods and Living with Dementia highlights the importance of home for people living with dementia and that neighbourhoods are seen to be relational, virtual, technological, connected, lived, remembered, and imagined, and to exist within and across time. The book is organised under five key parts: •The Lived Neighbourhood •Neighbourhoods, Measurement and Technology •Neighbourhoods and Big Data •Personal Well-Being and Neighbourhood Programme Support •Bringing it Together and Future Directions This comprehensive book is appropriate to a wide range of readers and disciplines including those living with dementia, the related health and voluntary professions, family carers, practitioners, academics, and students undertaking a variety of courses aligned to gerontology, dementia studies and human geography. The Reconsidering Dementia Series is an interdisciplinary series published by Open University Press that covers contemporary issues to challenge and engage readers in thinking deeply about the topic. The dementia field has developed rapidly in its scope and practice over the past ten years and books in this series will unpack not only what this means for the student, academic and practitioner, but also for all those affected by dementia. Series Editors: Dr Keith Oliver and Professor Dawn Brooker MBE. John Keady is a mental health nurse who has been involved in dementia care for over 30 years. Since 2006, he has held a joint appointment between the University of Manchester and the Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust. He was the Chief Investigator of the Neighbourhoods study.

In the acclaimed Holding On to Home, Uriel Cohen and Gerald Weisman explored the relationship between the physical environment and people with dementia, setting forth a program of practical design principles linked to specific therapeutic goals. Now, in Contemporary Environments for People with Dementia, Uriel Cohen and Kristen Day extend that design guidance and offer information on currently existing facilities to illustrate the application of those principles.

This book is designed to help people with Alzheimer's disease and seniors with dementia connect to something they may have enjoyed decades ago, it provides an opportunity to build bridges of communication with their current family and friends. It is a full-color, high-resolution picture book featuring different places in the world with their names, making them easy to recognize. Looking at this beautiful picture book with your loved one is an activity that will reduce their anxiety, stimulate their mind and encourage them to relax. In order not to cause stress to the reader, this book contains no text (except for the names of places) and does not mention anything related to Alzheimer's disease or dementia. A simple book to look at and an opportunity to spend time with older people who may need more (help, love, patience) and especially with those who have memory or communication problems. It is a great gift idea for people with Alzheimer's disease and seniors with dementia.

This book examines the emerging problems and opportunities that are posed by media innovations, spatial typologies, and cultural trends in (re)shaping identities within the fast-changing milieus of the early 21st Century. Addressing a range of social and spatial scales and using a phenomenological frame of reference, the book draws on the works of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Don Hide to bridge the seemingly disparate, yet related theoretical perspectives across a number of disciplines. Various perspectives are put forward from media, human geography, cultural studies, technologies, urban design and architecture etc. and looked at thematically from networked culture and digital interface (and other) perspectives. The book probes the ways in which new digital media trends affect how and what we communicate, and how they drive and reshape our everyday practices. This mediatization of space, with fast evolving communication platforms and applications of digital representations, offers challenges to our notions of space, identity and culture and the book explores the diverse yet connected levels of technology and people interaction.

A hopeful and practical guide to taming the challenges of dementia with creative interventions inspired by real stories of sufferers and caregivers alike. If you've ever cared for someone with dementia, you might empathize with Alice, who tumbled down a rabbit hole and discovered herself in an unhappy world where time moved oddly, animals and plants spoke, but mostly to berate you. Familiar objects became terribly out of scale. If you're caring for someone with dementia now, you might feel like someone changed the rules of reality and that you need a guide, preferably someone kinder than the perennially late rabbit. This book supports the journey—taken by both the caregiver and the person with dementia—providing loved ones with practical recommendations and enriched with human empathy. This book helps ease the stress by offering interventions and non-pharmaceutical therapeutic suggestions. It helps decode dementia's visceral world and supports non-cognitive human experiences. It shares stories of real people struggling to survive the challenges presented by dementia paired with practical examples of interventions that target the miseries of dementia behaviors, triggers, and causalities induced by them. The book provides options in the art of caregiving alongside the power of place, furnishings, light, color, technology, nature, and the senses. Barbara Huelat explores options in human engagement, the experience of destinations, positive distractions, familiar settings, furnishings, light, color, technology, nature, and the emotion of the senses. She offers design interventions that support the family caregivers in functional and emotional outcomes. No cure exists for dementia, but the tips, tools, strategies and suggestions include here provide tools for caregivers and those with dementia to make the experience more comfortable and calm.

Alzheimer's is swiftly on the rise: it is estimated that every 67 seconds, someone develops the disease. For many, the words "Alzheimer's disease" or "dementia" immediately denote severe mental loss and, perhaps, madness. Indeed, the vast majority of media coverage of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other types of dementia focuses primarily on the losses experienced by people diagnosed and the terrible burden felt by care partners yearning for a "magic bullet" drug cure. Providing an accessible, question-and-answer-format primer on what touches so many lives, and yet so few of us understand, Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia: What Everyone Needs to Know(R) contributes what is urgently missing from public knowledge: unsparing investigation of their causes and manifestations, and focus on the strengths possessed by people diagnosed. Steven R. Sabat mines a large body of research to convey the genetic and biological aspects of Alzheimer's disease, its clinical history, and, most significantly, to reveal the subjective experience of those with Alzheimer's or dementia. By clarifying the terms surrounding dementia and Alzheimer's, which are two distinct conditions, Sabat corrects dangerous misconceptions that plague our understanding of memory dysfunction and many other significant abilities that people with AD and dementia possess even in the moderate to severe stages. People diagnosed with AD retain awareness, thinking ability, and sense of self; crucially, Sabat demonstrates that there are ways to facilitate communication even when the person with AD has great difficulty finding the words he or she wants to use. From years spent exploring and observing the points of view and experiences of people diagnosed, Sabat strives to inform as well as to remind readers of the respect and empathy owed to those diagnosed and living with dementia. Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia conveys this type of information and more, which, when applied by family and professional caregivers, will help improve the quality of life of those diagnosed as well as of those who provide support and care.

This book explores how dementia studies relates to dementia’s growing public profile and corresponding research economy. The book argues that a neuropsychiatric biopolitics of dementia positions dementia as a syndrome of cognitive decline, caused by discrete brain diseases, distinct from ageing, widely misunderstood by the public, that will one day be overcome through technoscience. This biopolitics generates dementia’s public profile and is implicated in several problems, including the failure of drug discovery, the spread of stigma, the perpetuation of social inequalities and the lack of support that is available to people affected by dementia. Through a failure to critically engage with neuropsychiatric biopolitics, much dementia studies is complicit in these problems. Drawing on insights from critical psychiatry and critical gerontology, this book explores these problems and the relations between them, revealing how they are facilitated by neuro-agnostic dementia studies work that lacks robust biopolitical critiques and sociopolitical alternatives. In response, the book makes the case for a more biopolitically engaged "neurocritical" dementia studies and shows how such a tradition might be realised through the promotion of a promissory sociopolitics of dementia.