Elements of Illness
According to the art: Illness can be discerned in various ways, and in ways that correspond to how the Arts can address them. Here we list and discuss some elements of illness.
Illness as Questions
According to the art: An element of illness takes the form of questions. The questions can be about the clinical course of a particular health problem or about how a person’s life plans need to be altered. Disfigurement and migraine are featured examples.
Electricity
According to the art: This movie was created to render the seizure experience of people with epilepsy.; the storyline is secondary to this aim. It also shows how filmmaking can be effective in capturing the seizure experience in ways that other art forms cannot.
We Are Not Ourselves
A Family’s Trajectory, Denial, and Grace Amid Dementia
According to the art: This novel covers a sixty–year span of a woman’s life and how the period during her husband’s early-onset Alzheimer’s disease affected the trajectory of her life as a spouse, a mother, a nurse, and a person with dreams and ambitions. Insights are offered on family relationships, daily life, and health care delivery and financing. How denial manifests and evolves is explored, and how grace can come to the fore is rendered.
Dementia Experience:
The Biomedical and the Literary (Mosley)
Projects So That I Can Say More
According to the art: Here are excerpts from the novel The Days of Ptolemy Grey that extend or elaborate on classic biomedical explanations of what people experience with dementia.
In the Land of Pain
According to the art: Alphonse Daudet was a nineteenth century French writer whose syphilis progressed to the late stages involving devastating neuropsychiatric effects. The book comprises notes he made about his experiences with pain, unsteadiness and paralysis, what chronic pain and illness does to personal outlooks, isolation, and relationships, and the pleasures and pains of morphine.
Dementia Experience:
The Biomedical and the Literary (Solnit)
Projects So That I Can Say More
According to the art: Here are excerpts from a literary nonfiction book that extends and elaborates on classic biomedical explanations of what people experience with dementia.
Tabes Dorsalis:
The Biomedical and the Literary (Daudet)
Projects So That I Can Say More
According to the art: Here biomedical text describing tabes dorsalis, a manifestation of neurosyphilis is compared to literary descriptions made by Alphonse Daudet based on his own sufferings from the condition.
The Wilderness
Imagining What Dementia Could be Like
According to the art: Samantha Harvey endeavors to show the experience of Alzheimer’s dementia from early stages to end stages through a character’s life. She also imagines what it could be like for a person to realize they are progressing through dementia. The experience she imagines hinges on not just that memories and facts are unavailable, but that they can come back as independent agents to cause confusion, disorientation, and fear.
The Father
(Play)
Through an interplay among set designs, lighting effects, repeated scene sequences, and time loops, this play gives the audience a sense of the dementia experience, not just a view of it. The audience at times has as much trouble as the character with dementia discerning fact from fiction, past from present, and here from there.