Dementia seen from multiple perspectives

Have you ever wondered how later and later perspectives would view dementia?

Bettina Wichers M.Sc. and Terri O’Fallon Ph.D. developed a research project that asks this question. By bringing together Terri’s research on STAGES and Bettina’s research and practical experience in diagnostics and dementia counseling, this inquiry comes to a more in-depth perspective of how people perceive and understand dementia.

They embedded 6 new sentence starters related to dementia In the general STAGES Sentence completion test. Then 20 people took the new “Dementia Inventory”. Their responses were scored and sent to a statistician to do a Crombach’s Alpha statistic to ensure reliability and internal consistency.

Next they took all of the responses to the six dementia completions and looked at each developmental response to unfold a trajectory of different views towards Dementia.

We will present our findings at the IEC for the first time, giving a first insight into possible practical implications out of this research.

WICHERS, Bettina

Denmark

As a transpersonal gerontologist with more than 25 years of professional experience in the fields of aging, dementia, gerontopsychiatric care and adult education, I conduct research into the similarities between dementia and spiritual awakening. After an extraordinary experience of consciousness, an experience of ‘nothingness’, I experienced the often-described challenging consequences of a radical spiritual transformation experience with symptoms very similar to, if not the same as, dementia symptoms, during a process that lasted several years. As a dementia expert and scientist, I was able to document these years as phenomenological research, whereby I was simultaneously the subject and the object of the research. The findings from this research suggest that dementia and spiritual awakening are based on the same phenomenological experience: the dissolution of the self, and that dementia could be a misunderstood and therefore unintegrated spiritual development process that leads to an unconscious rather than conscious dissolution of the self. This not only shows the importance of spirituality for the ageing process, but also suggests that spiritual development and spiritual awakening represent the evolutionary potential of ageing: gero-transcendence into the transpersonal and conscious rather than unconscious dissolution of the self.

http://www.bettinawichers.de