Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Words are powerful tools of communication which colour the world and shape lives. They contribute to power, ideology, racism and culture. Words carry layers of meaning, for example, “white” can often be associated with purity, virtues and birth, at least in western cultures (white Christmas, pure as white, virginal white), and “black” is on the opposite spectrum, often associated with darkness, badness, and death (blackmail, black death, black mood, black book). For the same reasons, based on feelings that derive from the semantics of dementia, should we be changing the labels to help and alter the withering attitudes towards dementia and the cognitive deficits associated with it? Should we stop using the word dementia, and substitute it with one that doesn’t frighten us? Should we re-label the dementias with words that carry a less disparaging connotation, and are kinder to the sense of stigma and hopelessness associated with de-mentia, out of mind and de-mented, mad? After all, we are often reminded by people living with dementia: “I might be forgetful, but I’m not mad,” “I couldn’t find my way back home, but I’m not mad.” The aim of this paper is to tackle the stigma associated with the definition of the syndrome of dementia. The paper is methodologically based on qualitative analysis of interviews of people living with a form of dementia and their care-givers. The goal of the research is to provide communities and medical practitioners with the linguistic tools for a new definition of the dementias.