About Tradition and Triumph: Patients Popularise Dementia Narrative

Abstract

This chapter dissects how societal expectations regarding the dementia patient’s performance and productivity impose successful narrative articulation as central to the perception of identity, social assertion and self. It explores the phenomenon that the first patient accounts present linear and edited (rather than chaos) narratives, and aims at understanding how the discrepancy between illness process and narrative plot impacts on the reader’s perception of patient and condition. A comparison of patient-versus co-authored texts that additionally accounts for different stages in the severity of dementia is as revealing as an analysis of sequential publications by the same patient. This investigation supports the argument that gradually intensifying patient activism, also related to their popularising dementia narratives, enables patients’ freedom of presentation towards structurally less accomplished accounts.