Pop culture helps The Dementia Collective foster understanding
We notice blueBell Village is using pop culture to expand the ways people understand what it's like to live with dementia. While the company primarily offers a platform called Connect that helps families coordinate dementia care, it also has a podcast called The Dementia Collective that recently released two bonus episodes of note.
The first is about two Pokémon — Slowpoke and Psyduck — who are labelled "confused" due to their delayed cognitive processing and tendency to become overwhelmed by stimuli. Host Andrew Karesa explains that labelling people with dementia as "confused" leads to misunderstanding. "When we reduce (the complexity of dementia) down to one word, we stop looking deep, trying to understand what's happening under the water," he said. "When we stop looking deeper, we often misinterpret behaviour." The second is about Sarek, an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which Karesa says presents an allegory for dementia in relation to societal structure. The episode is about "what happens when a society built on rational supremacy confronts cognitive instability."
Karesa founded blueBell Village after his grandmother, Shirley Bell, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and The Dementia Collective podcast usually features guests with lived experiences of their own. The latest regular episode is a conversation with Anoushka Fernandes of The Soggy Sandwich, a blog about dementia care and grief. She discusses how dementia in South Asian homes is often silenced and stigmatized, and how blueBell Connect helped keep various family members aligned as she cared for her mother.
