'Little Nothings of the Everyday' which cut across the silence of dementia

A rush of articles from the south of France about the importance of music and arts intervetions in care homes, particularly for those residents with dementia.

In Montreal (Aude), a whole programme of arts, music and film has been implemented to bring care home residents in touch with their own memories and with the broader community. A series of music workshops have been run over a term by music therapist Jean-Luc Dragotto. Designed to stimulate communication, good mental health and to allow residents with dementia to reclaim a sense of identity and be valorised, the intervention has proved such a success that they will be followed by an multi-media artist and film showings about life in the Pyrennees.


Nearby, Perkusaintex is a programme of percussion workshops in St.Exupery run by musician Sylvie Blondel. Through the use of rhythm, Mme Blondel encourages residents, many of whom have lost much of their verbal communication, to find an alternative route for expression. This week, the group performed for the first time in public to an invited audience of relatives and friends in the care home. The concert included a specially-written piece "Il en faut peu pour être heureux" [This is what you need to be happy]

As Mme Blondel says, what is needed to facilitate this is actually very little - ces petits riens qui font le quotidien (these little nothings which make up the everyday) but which have such transformative effects for people with dementia. While in the UK we continue to debate whether or not we should be investing in such activity, the French at least understand the economic and social value of such interventions, which are not costly but do require creativity in care planning, budgeting on local and national levels and associated bureaucracy...

Memoriam - the power of art to express the individual nightmare and public invisibility of Alzheimer's

Yesterday at the fabulous Quilts exhibition at the V&A in London, I was brought up short in front of Michele Walker's astonishing quilt Memoriam, which she produced in 2002 as a testimony to her mother who had suffered from dementia.

It stands in the tradition of commemorative quilts and with its use of materials and imagery expresses both the chaotic and distressing impact of the loss of memory on the individual and their family as well as presenting a challenge to the lack of public awareness of this.

With its wire wool and clear plastic to express the imprint of the experience on a template of Walker's own skin, the quilt is one of the most eloqent depictions I have seen of the visceral and ever-present 'scar' of dementia on the person with dementia and on the sufferer's kith and kin.

Displayed alongside the quilt, the original study includes a familar 'cause' ribbon shape, made out of fragments of her mother's wedding veil. I was so struck by this - Walker's deep immersion in the centuries' long tradition of female quilt making including and preserving individual and family memories allows her in this piece to express the melancholy and sense of loss while ensurign her mother's hopes as a young bride are retained for the long term.

The use of the twisted ribbon - so familiar from AIDS, Breast Cancer and other campaigns - is also a strong statement of the personal and the political. Dementia has no ribbon, it is invisible by contrast in the public and media gaze. Without this awareness, the frayed edges of the individual dementia sufferer's mind, the way in which s/he is relegated to the margins of society and care, can in turn be relegated to the margins of political discourse and health care planning.

It is this kind of invisibilty which makes it 'acceptable' that so many local health organisations in the UK simply do not account for the funding they are meant to apply for implementation of the National Dementia Stategy, which makes it acceptable for my local MP to say he will not be able to attend the briefing from the Alzheimer's Society on what is the most pressing health issue of our times because his schedule is too busy, which makes it acceptable for us to tolerate the individual nightmares of decline and loss Memoriam depicts.

Every day my mother's dementia -and her decline into a kind of non-being both individually and within society -is inscribed into her being and into mine. Like Walker's 'skin' under the wire wool and plastic, the real impact of dementia on the individuals and their families remains unnoticed and wilfully ignored.

Dolls used in German care home for residents with dementia

Interesting article from the German press about the use of special dolls in a Bavarian care home for the elderly.

Mikaela and Mikael have moved in to the Lucas-Cranach home in Bavaria to help with the emotional and social care for residents with dementia. The special soft dolls are designed to (re)awaken parental feelings and to enable residents to express emotions they may not be able any longer to verbalise.

Caring for the dolls, or a teddy bear, also provides a useful conversational prompt between the residents and with carers and family members.

Researchers from Newcastle General Hospital have apparently studied the intervention and found it to be imnportant in encouraging both emotional and social expression. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for this kind of creative action to be translated from research into action in the UK...

Puppen Ziehen ins Altenheim