Dementia Poetry

I was recently introduced to the work of John Killick by David Lale, a filmmaker also interested in the subject of dementia.


Killick is a writer who has published two books by of poems by people with dementia.  The poems are fashioned out of the speech of individuals with the condition.  He explains,


"I write down or tape-record, and then transcribe, the words of a person. The resulting poem involves selection, but I never add a word. I share the poem back with the person and seek their permission to show to others, and in some cases to publish. "


He gives these poems a title and form on the page.  They are beautiful and poignant.  Some read like a monologue from a play by Samuel Beckett; the sentences struggle to work, nothing is certain and all linguistic rules seem provisional.  But even the most confused collection of words offer more than mere clues, they speak for a person living in a world of feeling, a human being with worries and desires who should be listened to carefully.  Killick believes that to approach these texts as poetry helps one to bypass the often unhelpful habits of rational thought.   I would agree that to tune into, and give attention to the seemingly bizarre metaphores and images created by someone with dementia, a carer can gain important insights, which can be used by a Specal-like care approach to make the sufferer's life much less frightening.





ON THE OTHER SIDE

I'm just going round to see what's round the corner...

I've lived here twenty-five weeks in the city,

up and down the language, twice up and down...

I'd better just have another look...

I'll tell you if you can understand the language.

And I'm talking, talking all the time...

I'm just off to see if it's changed at all...

I didn't know if you would understand,

with you living on the other side...

I'll just see if it's all right over there...

Young girls wearing white on the other side

of their dress getting married...

I'll just see if I can get far enough along...

©John Killick

Other poems are full of memories, this by Ian McQueen, "a younger man with dementia from the west of Scotland",

DEFENCE

            Bobby was bigger than me.

            And when I got it, I got

            a right good thwack from this bloke.

            He just ladled into me,

            and I couldn’t stotter, I was

            lying in the playground. Biff. Out.

            Bobby was going to get a doing.

            And I administered it.

            If you steam into me: Stars.

            I cloaked myself in my self

            and that was good for me.

            I got that from him too.

            I had my dose

            and Bobby had his dose.

            Big Al’s bigger than me too,

            but I’m not going

            to lie down under his blows.

            He’s in there. I can still

            cloak myself in my self.

Institute of Ageing: A tour

While in Newcastle last week I revisited the Institute of Ageing run by Professor Kirkwood.  I was shown around their suite of new buildings mostly paid for by the Wellcome Trust, full of sparkling new laboratories and rooms for examining volunteers for the multitude of clinical trials that are running at any one time.  

In order to understand the effects of ageing on the brain, much of the important research depends on studying volunteers in the later stages of life right through to death, when their donated brains are carefully removed for detailed analysis and storage.  They are kept in the Brain Tissue Resource, or brain bank, where over a thousand of these donated brains are kept either in specially cold freezers or preserved in tubs. For inspection, the brains are usually sliced very finely for examination under microscopes.

I was also shown the 'Gait Lab', a windowless room full of cameras, where they use Motion Capturing technology, designed for the animation film industry, but used here to examine the effects of different diseases like dementia with Lewy bodies and Parkinson's on the way people walk.  Apparently it could be used as a diagnostic tool in the future, because movement is one of the first things effected by both diseases.

The institute is also home to one of the most powerful MRI scanners in the country.  It is used to examine the brains of living volunteers to try to understand how exactly brains are effected by diseases like Alzheimer's, and how these changes alter the behavior of the sufferer.

My plan is to return and film interviews in and around each of these locations  with a leading researcher in each field, to try to construct a comprehensible picture of the current state of research into dementia, and how it is understood.