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Cognitive and social strengths of people living with dementia: Discoveries through Harré’s method
Author(s) -
Sabat Steven R.
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal for the theory of social behaviour
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.615
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1468-5914
pISSN - 0021-8308
DOI - 10.1111/jtsb.12287
Subject(s) - dementia , psychology , neuropsychology , cognition , disease , identification (biology) , psychiatry , psychotherapist , clinical psychology , cognitive psychology , medicine , pathology , botany , biology
Abstract From the time Alzheimer’s disease (AD) was described and named in the first decades of the 20 th Century, a biomedical lens was used to examine and understand what Oliver Sacks 1970) called ‘the disease the person has’ and the dysfunctions caused by that disease. Treatments were mainly pharmaceutical and neuropsychological tests administered in clinics were among the outcome measures used to quantify dysfunctions and assess the efficacy of drugs. The final decades of the 20 th Century and the first decades of the 21 st Century witnessed the advent of qualitative approaches to understanding what Sacks termed, ‘the person the disease has’. The theoretical contributions of Rom Harré were essential to the identification of important aspects of the subjective experience and selfhood, as well as significant cognitive and social strengths, possessed by people deemed to be in the moderate to severe stages of the disease. I shall explore some of those contributions and their significance herein.