Dementia

Thursday

Charlotte Moore

Old, unhappy, far off things

August Geiger led an unremarkable life. Born in 1926, the third of ten children of a Catholic farming family in western Austria, the most unusual thing about him was his unwillingness ever to leave Wolfurt, the village where he had grown up. He built a house there, for his schoolteacher wife and their children, and refused ever to go on holiday. His wife had suggested that they go on a walk and call it their honeymoon, but August rejected even this slight change in his routine. It was, therefore, particularly poignant that when he developed Alzheimer’s disease, August’s dominant obsession became his desire to go home. Nothing could convince him

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 20 October 2016

In 1999 I went to the doctor about the impotence. Don’t worry, he said. I have good news for you. He prescribed a new drug called Viagra to get me over the psychological hump. It worked; spectacularly. In 2001 I went to the doctor mumbling about depression. Don’t worry, he said. I have good news for you. He prescribed a new drug called Prozac to lift me out of it. Within three months I was back on the poop deck of this ship of fools with the wind in my hair and salt spray on my face. In 2013 I went to the doctor because I couldn’t pee. A blood

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Shaw thing

T.E. Lawrence is like the gap-year student from hell. He visits a country full of exotic barbarians and after a busy few months rescuing them from their spiritual frailties, and helping them emulate their Western superiors, he returns home and never stops boring on about it. ‘How much I learned from them,’ he gushes, when what he means is, ‘How much they learned from me.’ That’s always been the view of Lawrence’s critics, among them fellow British army officers, who saw him as a reckless, attention-seeking fantasist. Howard Brenton’s new play offers a more charitable portrait of Lawrence as a brilliant, sensitive, rootless genius. The action opens with him newly

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 3 March 2016

What might have been Sir: Harry Mount points out that Boris Johnson is two years older than David Cameron (Diary, 27 February). Both, however, began their careers in the same year. On 15 June 1988 I interviewed David Cameron for a post in the Conservative Research Department; on 26 July it was Boris’s turn (‘Johnston’ in my diary). The former was signed up to cover trade and industry issues (memorably forgetting the trade figures when Mrs Thatcher asked him for them). Boris was invited to follow in the footsteps of father Stanley, who had been the department’s first environment expert in the Heath era. But journalism lured him away. Would

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 3 September 2015

Suicide and assisted dying Sir: As a mental health practitioner, I am grateful to Douglas Murray (‘Death watch’, 29 August) for his incisive commentary on the impact of legalised euthanasia on people with psychiatric conditions. Supporters of assisted dying argue that a permissive act would be tightly framed, but the scope would inevitably widen, as has occurred in Holland. Although Lord Falconer and fellow travellers would bar people of unsound mind from the intended provision, this would soon be challenged as discriminatory: because effectively, a person would be punished for losing decision-making capacity. If proponents of euthanasia are really so rational, while their opponents are blinded by emotion or faith, how

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Sea sound

It’s often not visual images that stimulate memory but a smell, a taste, the sound of pebbles crashing on to the beach, ice cream being scooped into a cone, seagulls circling overhead. Where was I when I first heard that sound? That’s why the National Trust (in association with the British Library sound archive) has just announced its Coastal Sounds of our Shores campaign. We are all invited to send in our own audio recordings from the beach: short, five-minute clips, impressions taken outdoors, in real time, which capture what the seaside means to us. Not photos, or postcards, but an online archive of sound memories. Interpreting our surroundings through

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Presence of mind

‘It’s hard to know how to tell this story,’ she said as she began. ‘Because it’s so loaded. It’s so heavy-duty.’ Lore Wolfson was talking about the death of her husband, Paul, or rather about the onset of the illness that led him a year later to take an overdose of heroin, aged 61. He had been diagnosed with early-onset dementia, in a peculiarly aggressive form, rapidly losing his words, his memory, his capacity to work or function independently. Lore began recording her conversations with Paul very soon after they knew for sure why he was having word-finding difficulties. ‘It was the natural thing to do,’ she said, because she’s

Thursday

Julie Burchill

Fat chance

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/theriseofleft-wingpopulism/media.mp3″ title=”Julie Burchill and Katie Hopkins discuss whether you can be fat and happy” startat=924] Listen [/audioplayer]I’m a very off-message type of fat broad; one who gladly admits she reached the size she is now solely through lack of discipline and love of pleasure, and who rather despises people (except those with proven medical conditions) who pretend that it is generally otherwise. I’m not attached to my fat in any but the most obvious way; would I lose it if I could snap my fingers? Without doubt. Would I work at losing it? Not a chance, Vance. ‘But it’s not about vanity,’ the weight bores bleat, ‘it’s about health.’

Friday

John Raffles

Dementia is 'an opportunity', according to Michael Gove. What a brave thing to say

Michael Gove said something startling about dementia in a speech last night launching an initiative called ‘The Good Right’ at the Legatum Institute. But blink and you would have missed it. If you regard dementia as a friend’s departure from our world rather than an opportunity to bring them closer to your heart, then you miss the essence of compassion. I bristled when I heard that – at first. Mary, my dearest friend in the world, a lady in her 90s, has dementia. Probably. Depending on how you define it. When I was visiting her the other day, a young GP breezed in and talked about her ‘dementia’ – right

Wednesday

Anne Jolis

Call them crazy - the foolhardy new incentives for dementia diagnoses

Remember this time last year, when Jeremy Hunt decried the ‘national shame’ of neglected old people suffering from undiagnosed dementia? The health secretary lamented that fewer than half of dementia cases are ever diagnosed, and promised ‘to make a big change.’ His initiative got rave reviews at the time. Now that the details are in, not so much. ‘A bounty on the head of certain patients’ is how the head of the Patients Association characterised NHS England’s new scheme, to pay doctors £55 per patient whom they diagnose with dementia. The so-called ‘Dementia Identification Scheme‘ began on October 1 and runs through March 31. It is, per the NHS document,

Thursday

Liz Anderson

Farewell, Speccie

So we are all going to have to pay for fatties to have stomach bands and bypasses, are we? It may be ‘cost-effective’ to treat the obese before they go on to develop diabetes and other medical problems, but I’m not sure how much sympathy they will get when we already hear about cancer patients having operations delayed and drugs withheld because of stretched NHS budgets. According to the OECD, Hungarians are the most obese people in the EU, followed by Brits. Rather surprisingly, Romanians are the least fat. Surprising, because on a recent holiday to the island of Lefkada, there were a huge number of Bulgarians, Serbs and Romanians.

Wednesday

Liz Anderson

How to beat Alzheimer's

British scientists have identified a set of proteins in the blood which can predict, with 87 per cent accuracy, the start of dementia. Symptoms, apparently, take about ten years to appear after the actual start of Alzheimer’s. Having lived with someone with this horrendous condition, I am certain that I wouldn’t want to take a blood test that would show that in a decade I would develop dementia unless, obviously, I could have it reversed. Ignorance is bliss… But research can’t move forward without volunteers. Between 2002 and 2012, 99.6 per cent of trials aimed at preventing or reversing the disease flopped because, doctors believe, patients were treated too late, when the disease was well under way. So perhaps we should all volunteer if we want to

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Why I get my health advice from the Daily Mail

When one is in one’s seventies, as I am, one begins to fear the horror of dementia and to carry out anxious checks on one’s memory to see if the brain is still working. The results in my case are not very encouraging. For example, it took me several days to remember that the film star who canoodled with Leonardo DiCaprio in the stern of the Titanic was called Kate Winslet, although I am an admirer of hers and even once met her. Nor can I remember the words of the songs and poems that I used to know by heart. Am I on my way to becoming a helpless

Thursday

Patrick Skene-Catling

How to get old without getting boring

When one notices the first symptoms of senile dementia (forgetting names, trying to remember the purpose of moving from one room to another, and so on), books can be wonderfully helpful. At the age of 80, Penelope Lively, the prolific, generally esteemed, novelist, has written an encouraging guidebook for the ageing: For me, reading is the palliative, the daily fix. Old reading, revisiting, but new reading too, lots of it, reading in all directions, plenty of fiction, history and archaeology always, reading to satisfy perennial tastes, reading sideways too — try her, try him, try that. Born Penelope Low in Cairo and brought up there and in England, she read

Thursday

Damian Thompson

The syphilitic sound of Schumann’s violin concerto is part of its genius

Robert Schumann met a wretched end. He died in a lunatic asylum where he thought the nurses were feeding him human faeces. Meanwhile he drove his fellow residents mad by sitting at the piano and bashing out nonsense-music until he had to be dragged away — a grotesque indignity for the creator of the most bewitching quicksilver fantasies in the history of the instrument. After Schumann’s death in 1856, the violinist Joseph Joachim hid away the strange concerto that the composer had written for him in 1853 because it showed evidence of softening of the brain. Clara, Robert’s widow, agreed. That became the conventional wisdom. The violin concerto was suppressed