Alzheimer's Disease Metaphors as Mirror and Lens to the Stigma of Dementia

This essay gives an overview of the metaphors that patients in comparison to caregivers employ to conceptualize their experience with the chronic degenerative, cognitive, and incurable aspects of Alzheimer's disease. It explores how the images (such as the journey, darkness, the death sentence, and torture) relate to the narration of cognitive decline and memory loss, and how these personal accounts negotiate with the culturally dominant dementia narrative that centers on the patient's passivity and dependence and is, usually, found in caregiver stories. This analysis, based on English, French, and German language texts, argues that the metaphors of this mainstream dementia narrative are, first, grounded in medico-scientific dementia discourse and, second, encapsulated in "Alzheimer's disease" as metaphor itself.