Sitting on orange seats in the corridor, Ms Verbeek, her niece Hannie and I are waiting for the general practitioner. Ms Verbeek seems a little restless and is quiet. She is 79 years old and lives by herself in a small town in the south of the Netherlands. We have met several times before, sometimes one on one, and sometimes …
Tag Archives: Alzheimer
Folding time: walk-talking joint moments in the nursing home
We knew each other from the drop-in centre. Aspects of our daily life concerns had been shared. ‘We’ were drop-in centre participants: the majority had been diagnosed with a form of dementia and were living alone. Others were volunteering, overseeing the daily course of events or, like myself, doing research. We had shared with Willem (74) attempts at keeping up …
Refraction of time
On a Thursday evening, five men gather around a dinner table. [1] Their host, a scientist from Surrey, England, has left them a note telling them to begin eating at 19:00 if he is not yet back himself. And so they do. They are in the midst of speculating about their hosts’ whereabouts when the door quietly opens. Their host …
Thinking with dementia. An introduction to the series
Fourteen stories
This series is a collection of fourteen stories that are written to ‘think with dementia’. Over the past three years, six PhD students from the anthropology department at the University of Amsterdam have conducted ethnographic research on dementia care in the Netherlands. When the PhD projects came to a close, we organised a workshop to bring our work …
Graphic Medicine and Medical Anthropology
This article is part of the series: Inhabitable Worlds
Introduction
When I began my graphic memoir series, Aliceheimers, it focused just on life with my mother Alice before and during dementia. But the revelatory insight that she has retained, even during the late stages of this sickness, has led me to sometimes let the character “Alice” metamorphose into an odd sort of sage. Here, she and I explore …
Top of the heap: Martyn Pickersgill
This article is part of the series: Top of the heap
This week Martyn Pickersgill of the University of Edinburgh speaks to “Top of the heap” about some recent books on humanitarianism, pharmaceuticals, dementia and expertise.
Martyn Pickersgill
Amongst other bits and pieces, I currently have two large projects on the go: one, on access to therapy in mental health, and the other, on neuroscience and family life. With regards to …