‘Blessed are the Pacemakers’: Dementia, Psychosis and The Psychoanalytic Discourse

Dementia has been described as the major mental health epidemic of the 21st century. Yet far from being the living death it was seen as up to the 1980s, revolutionary new research, lead by Tom Kitwood, has shown that, while people suffering from the illness have undergone severe cognitive impairment, they retain a deeply subjective, visceral intelligence that allows carers to communicate with them to a degree formerly thought impossible.…