Description: Offering an inter-disciplinary approach to spirituality and personhood in dementia care, the contributors to this book are leading practitioners and researchers in the field. They provide both a theoretical structure and a practical understanding of the essential role that spirituality can play in the affirmation of personhood and identity.
Brief description: Julian C. Hughes is a consultant in Old Age Psychiatry at North Tyneside General Hospital and an Honorary Clinical Senior Lecturer in the Institute for Ageing and Health at the University of Newcastle. He is currently the Chair of the Philosophy Special Interest Group of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He also held a short-term Fellowship in 2003 from the Wellcome Trust to consider quality of life in dementia.
Review Quotes: Spirituality & Personhood in Dementia confronts the central issue of dementia: the change in personhood experienced by those suffering from its conditions and by those who live with them or care for them, and what we can do about it. Every chapter in this book offers hope: not of a cure, but of human coping with conditions which seem to take away everything we understand as human... It is a book packed with intelligent commentary and fascinating practice; it has the poetry of life stories and personal encounters, the prose of academic reflection and debate on issues most avoid but again and again, a simple message: the person with dementia is still a person, not a relic from the past but living now.--plus (Quarterly Magazine of Christian Council on Ageing)