Paper short abstract:

Dementia challenges the temporality of illness and the rationality of personhood. Dementia is deficit in the (perfectly) well (or curable) person. Models of personhood which downplay irrationality, vulnerability, stress and the constant need for adaptability, stimatise both sufferer and carer.

Paper long abstract:

Dementia challenges the temporal notion of mental illness. It also challenges notions of personhood in uncomfortable ways. Understood as a loss of personhood, it looms as a frightening unbecoming. Incurable - and with a cure seemingly a long way off - it affects over one third of people over 85 years of age in some populations, making the cure a high priority. Only in recent years has this biomedical research preoccupation shifted to include attention on how to 'care' for those already living with dementia, as sufferers or carers. Dementia is presented as a significant challenge for professional and familial carers who have to deal with a 'person' becoming ever more unpredictable. But what understandings of personhood inform the often implicit understandings of the life cycle, vulnerability, rationality and relations of care that characterise much of the discourse of loss and challenge surrounding dementia? Anthropology's insights into personhood require rethinking so that a more dynamic and critical model which can encompass the vicissitudes of the human life cycle as it is played out in specific times and places can be brought to bear on dementia discourse and research. This model needs to recapture irrationality, vulnerability, stress and the need for adaptability as part of the human experience. The model of the (perfectly) well person - or curable person - renders dementia (and most 'mental illness') as deficit, making it all the more difficult for carers to deal with.