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Making Sense of Dementia: Carers' Perceptions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2008

Janet Askham
Janet Askham
Affiliation:
Age Concern Institute of Gerontology, King's College London, Cornwall House Annexe, London SE1 8TX.
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Abstract

This paper is about how the informal care givers of people recently diagnosed as suffering from dementia perceive and describe that condition. Data are drawn from semi-structured interviews with 106 such care givers (mainly adult children and spouses) carried out in a London Borough and a southern English market town. People's accounts of how they defined what was happening to their relative (his/her condition) could be divided into several categories; these are shown to be based on a number of different parameters: for example, normal versus abnormal; orderly versus unpredictable; simple versus complex; an illness versus not an illness. The reasons for the wide variety of understandings of dementia are examined; it is suggested that it may be due to general lack of information or poor communication with health service staff; to a need to choose a definition which accords with a particular kind of relationship with the dementia sufferer; to the kind of self-presentation favoured by the sufferer; or to the desire to achieve certain kinds of end within particular social contexts.

Keywords

Carersdementiainterpretationmeaningrelatives

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Ageing & Society , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , March 1995, pp. 103 - 114
Copyright
Copyright Cambridge University Press 1995

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