Column: Understanding Dementia and the Problems of Forgetting

By Adam Humphreys
Dementia Can be a Cruel Illness That Makes You Forget but We Mustn’t Forget Those Who Suffer With it.
The past few years has seen an increase in the number of people suffering from Dementia and that number is set to rise by more than a million. But in order to help those who live with it, we must first of all try and understand it. Dementia can be similar to Alzheimer’s, in that it can lead to forget things, causing you to forget both where you are or those around you. Dementia on the other hand can be crueller. It’s disease which affects the brain and in doing so can affect simple things like mobility, speech, memory, awareness and independence. At its worse, you can lose up to a third of your life’s memory and be left almost child-like in your demeanour.
Earlier this year two programmes where broadcast on TV, The Restaurant That Makes Mistakes on Channel 4 and Vicky McClure’s My Dementia Choir on BBC1. 
Now the purpose of the former was to show to that individuals living with the disability can still be of service to society and in the workplace. My Dementia Choir was to demonstrate that those with the illness can still function in a working environment.
In The Restaurant That Makes Mistakes, the staff all live with various types of dementia and we see them go through the process of working in a busy environment. My Dementia Choir we see how various individuals living with the illness learn how to come together to form a choir. The result, it has to be said, was astonishing. Vicky McClure, who was one of the people behind the project had a personal reason for doing it. Her grandmother suffered with Dementia and she had to watch as a person she loved began to slowly disappear before dying.
In the BBC 1 medical drama, Casualty, viewers watched as Duffy, played by Cathy Shipton, was diagnosed with Vascular Dementia earlier this year. Since then she’s gradually been coming to terms with the illness but also the impending upset that is to come.
On the ITV soap Emmerdale, Ashley, played by John Middleton, was diagnosed with the disability. In a ground-breaking episode in 2016 the bosses decided to air an episode to show people the world through the eyes of someone with the illness. In the episode all the characters were recast, simple things like coins were just bits of metal and words were all mashed-up. The idea was to show the confusion and not being able to recognise your friends or family. Viewer feedback was said to be overwhelming. 
Now whilst dementia isn’t an actual disability it has been recognised as a Cognitive Disability due to how it can affect the brain and how it can function