Dementia and Graphic Medicine

Dementia and Graphic Medicine explores how graphic medicine-through memoirs by caregivers and families-offers nuanced understandings and humane representations of individuals with dementia that restore their personhood, dignity, and agency. Dementia, a neurodegenerative condition, often reduces individuals to their impairments, overlooking their personhood. This book challenges this, critiquing the influence of mind-body dualism, biomedicine on personhood, and the institutional dynamics that perceive those living with dementia as a "living death." It examines the transformative potential of graphic medicine in enabling dementia caregivers to visually articulate their interpretations of the complex experiences of individuals with dementia. Utilizing Tom Kitwood's concept of personhood as a framework, the study uncovers a diverse range of subjective experiences and proposes an alternative to the biomedicalization of dementia, promoting a more compassionate and humanistic approach to caregiving. Additionally, it investigates how non-medical conceptualizations and alternative social responses to dementia challenge existing hierarchical models and stereotypes in dementia caregiving. Bridging dementia studies, graphic medicine, and health humanities, this work provides scholars, practitioners, and caregivers with innovative insights for compassionate understanding, inclusive care, and social change. The book will also be suitable for readers in visual studies and narrative medicine.

Laboni Das is an independent researcher and former Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Institute of Technology, Trichy, India. Her research interests include literature and medicine, comics studies, graphic medicine, and health humanities. Her research articles have appeared in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, The Comics Grid, Journal of Medical Humanities, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, among others. She is a recipient of the Jawaharlal Nehru Scholarship for Doctoral Studies. Sathyaraj Venkatesan is Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Trichy, India. He specializes in health humanities and comics studies, with an emphasis on graphic medicine. He is the author/co-author/editor/co-editor of ten books and over hundred research articles that span African American literature, health humanities graphic medicine, film studies, and other literary and cultural disciplines. His recent co-edited/co-authored books are Drawing the Pandemic: COVID 19 and Graphic Medicine (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) and Pandemics and Epidemics in Cultural Representation (Springer, 2022).

Introduction, 1. Picturing Illness: A History of Comics in Medicine, 2. Public Expressions of Dementia: A Critical Analysis, 3. "The Person Comes First": Person-centered Care Approach, 4. "The Beatification-incarceration Spectrum": Empowering Dementia Through Positive Verbo-Visuals, 5. "A Constant Sense of Going Back to Square One": Impact of Medical Neoliberalism on Dementia, Conclusion, Index