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Do you think the media tries actively to hide people living very well with early dementia?
Do you think the media tries actively to hide people living very well with early dementia?
Don’t shoot the messenger, but this is effectively a question which Norman McNamara, well known campaigner and a person living with dementia, asked on a public forum as follows.
But when you think about it, you rarely get ‘success’ stories about or written by people living well with an early dementia.
This phenomenon, to be fair, might be part of a wider picture, of the media tending to focus on bad news stories, or “shocks”.
Not to generalise, but often irresponsible journalists have tended to sensationalise news stories anyway, “not letting facts get in the way of a good story”.
It is thought that there are currently about 900,000 people currently living with dementia in the UK. Some of them are living well by the law of averages?
But the question asked poses wider issues of more potential concern. Does the public need to be ‘scared’ in order to donate to a cause?
Might it be effective to use the words “bomb”, “timebomb” and “flood” to shock people into action through donation to a dementia charity?
The focus of efforts can of course be the elusive “cure”, with proponents arguing that cures for dementia have been denied resource monies compared to, for example, the cancer charities.
It can also be argued that there is a genuine shock in the story, that it would be quite inappropriate to sanitise the dementia narrative. For example, almost every week there’s a new revelation about cuts in social care.
As it happens, I had been thinking about a similar issue: on the nature of the term “dementia friendly communities”.
A friend of mine, whose mother lives with dementia, said to me: “Whenever I see that a café is ‘dementia friendly’, I get immediately reassured.”
On the other hand, another close friend of mine, living with dementia, said: “I find the concept of dementia friendly communities intensely patronising.”
When I asked her why, she said it is simply inappropriate to think of people with dementia as one huge group as they have differing needs and abilities.
Maybe the term ‘community’ is meant to reflect this diversity though?
I am physically disabled, and I have often thought about whether I would welcome a national policy called “disabled friendly communities”.
In a way, giving a whole group of people a label negates personhood and individual identity. On the other hand, criticism of the term might be overly politically correct, and one should be intuitively positive about any initiative which is inclusive for people in society?
The late Tony Benn used to explain his views on equality in terms of not forcing people to be equal. Benn argued that a more useful way to conceptualise the situation was to think of removing obstacles that made people more unequal.
But I feel the question that Norman poses is an appropriate one. If we are to embrace truly the notion of a ‘dementia friendly communities’, we need to embrace the idea too that some people with dementia are inspirational and can be leaders themselves.
The notion of presenting people living well with dementia is therefore a very important one, and to omit them from the narrative would be a very dangerous pursuit.
That is, it would be if such a pursuit were deliberate: presumption of innocence, and all that.
The BBC’s current political editor, Nick Robinson, calls this ‘bias by omission’, and, whilst we share rather different political perspectives perhaps, on this I feel Norman and Nick are together right.
The budget
I have a terrific regard for the University of Oxford and the PPE course (Politics, Philosophy and Economics).
As an educationalist, I think it is a very clever combination of three subjects taught to a hugh standard by three separate examination schools. However, as a neuroscientist, I think the subject is ahead of its time. For me, it represents whether the markets operate with free will or deterministically, and whether its expedient for governments to make decisions around such findings, inter alia. And the list of PPE graduates is a wonder to behold: Andreas Whittam-Smith, Guto Harri, Mary Ann Sieghart, Nick Cohen, Nick Robinson; and of course, Stephanie Flanders, Hugh Pym and Ed Balls. I was disappointed, but not particularly surprised, to see George Osborne not on this list.
With the ritualistic nature of the Budget, it is easy to forget that the budget for any business entity represents the pivotal focus of budgeting (as the name would imply) and forecasting. This is interesting in the context of the overall business strategy, and provides an important exercise for seeing the progress of the organisation with its economic goals. In summary, we saw inflation go up to 4.4% yesterday, GDP is going down (although hopefully it is likely we will avoid a ‘double dip’ of two quarters of negative growth seeing us back into recession), unemployment rising particularly youth unemployment, and interest rates probably about to go up. The danger with the cuts strategy, of cutting quite so much fast so fast, was that we would risk slow growth, with people being laid off in the public sector with the private sector not picking up the slack, as the Tory-led government had hoped. This would mean there would be less spending power, more unemployment benefit being paid, less tax revenue, and the deficit actually not being cut as fast as desirable. It is also incredibly depressing for morale. Many of us have felt that even if the deficit is paid off fast the wreckage that would be produced socially would be difficult to recover from. Hence, we at Cambridge, have a somewhat different emphasis. We don’t call it “Politics, Philosophy and Economics”, but “Social and Political Sciences”. You’ll see this perhaps this Saturday…
