Social Construction of Dementia

Nancy Harding is a Lecturer at Nuffield Institute for Health, Leeds University. Colin Palfrey is Education Consultant at the Institute of Health Care Studies, University of Wales, Swansea.

The book deserves to be widely read by sociologists, medical practioners, social workers, nurses, and others: it provides alternative understandings of dementia upon which new forms of practice might be developed. Most important, however is the challenge with which the book confronts its readers: to deconstruct their own fears of ageing, dying and death, and reflect upon embeddedness of these fears in the contemporary culture of late capitalism.

• 1. Evaluating the Care of People with Dementia: Beyond the Biomedical Paradigm. 2. Methodological Framework: Social Constructionism. 3. What is Dementia? The Medical Model. 4. Interpreting Dementia: Psychological and Linguistic Models. 5. The Scientific Construction of the `Disease' of Dementia. 6. Medical Diagnosis and the Construction of Dementia. 7. Society and the Construction of Dementia: The Sociology of the Dementing Body. 8. The Social Construction of Dementia. Appendix. References. Further Reading. Index.