1

• Confabulation in late onset dementia
  triangulating censored histories through
  first-person narrative and literary fiction
• Dr Andrea Capstick
• Bradford Dementia Group

2
Selection criteria emergent methodology

• 1) Extracts from first-person narratives of
  people with dementia whose veracity is doubted on
  account of their diagnosis (confabulators)
• 2) Matched sections from historically accurate
  literary fiction (reliable narrators)
• 3) Events excluded from mainstream
  discourse/collective, conventionalised memory

3
Alzheimers first case Auguste Deter

• The mania for diagnosis
• Insane jealousy
• The madwoman in the attic (Gilbert and Gubar 2004)

4
Alzheimer and Kraepelin
5
Confabulation and unreliable narration

• a typical symptom of dementia, confabulations
  are usually defined as false narratives or
  statements about world and/or self due to some
  pathological mechanism (Orulv and Hyden, 2006)
• A narrating character or storyteller in a
  literary or other artistic work who provides
  inaccurate, misleading, conflicting, or otherwise
  questionable information to the reader or
  audience (Booth 1961)

6
Augustes treatment regime

• Isolation
• Cold water baths
• Died in 1906 aged 55 from septicaemia resulting
  from decubitus ulcers (pressure sores)

7
Fingersmith Sarah Waters (2005 444)

• I remember...the closing of the icy water over my
  face, the rushing of it into my mouth and
  nose...I thought I had died. Then they winched
  me up and dropped me again.

• Based on Hamilcar M (1910) Legally dead
  experiences during seventeen weeks detention in a
  private asylum.

8
Catherine reliable or unreliable narrator?

• It looked like a bath...a new pram with a
  wonderful big canopy...I was drowning three times
  an hour back then...they wanted to take the bath
  out of the cold water where they put me to
  rest...for no reason at all...they wanted me to
  lie in that bath until the end...until I die.
• (from Brown and Clegg eds, 2007 143-147)

9
The plague dogs Richard Adams (1977)

• Uses animal experimentation as an allegory for
  treatment of concentration camp victims
• But you dont want it to drown, do you?
  asked Mr Powell, a shade of anxiety creeping into
  his voice. If it No, interjected Dr
  Boycott quickly as though to check him before he
  could say more....Its not intended to drown
  not this time anyway and I think probably not
  next time either depending on the results of
  course.
• The large mongrel dog in the tank was
  continuing to struggle...but so feebly now that
  its body hung almost vertically in the water.
• 
  (Adams,
  1977 2)

10
Hypothermia experiment

• The Germans put me in a what do you call
  it?...... (Catherine)

11
Allied bomb dumping

• I was in Sofia in one of the bombardments in
  1943... That night I was bombed... we went into
  the National Bank and I sheltered and that was
  all... it was the English bombing... they were
  bombing the petrol in Romania and when they
  returned they dropped the rest of the bombs on
  Sofia.
• (Dimiter Clegg et al 2010)

• Sometimes we just picked a big city and
  blasted the hell out of it...There was an
  unspoken rule never to bring the bombs back home.
  My last run we ended up dumping our full load on
  a big park full of refugees.
• (Jordan, 2008 Mudbound)

12
Mays story

• My eldest brother didnt come back. Took them
  all marching right through another part of the
  German area. All these fellas, they had no shoes
  on. When he fell they wouldnt be bothered with
  them. They used to tear up the reports.

• On the march or in the sidings it had happened
  there, he thought being turned to a thing. You
  dont last without water. They could have gone
  on without eating, but not without water.
• (Kennedy, 2007, Day 61-62)

13
Striking analogies Behind the wallpaper..........
...........

• Hilda It seems now that this room was part of
  my flat...maybe it still is under all the
  paintwork and so forth.
• Dunmore (1998 p 75) The town was like a paper
  wrapper you could rip through any time, and youd
  be back there.
• Cover image from Charlotte Perkins Gilman The
  Yellow Wallpaper

14
Social amnesia (Jacoby, 1996)

• Long term memory often stays relatively intact in
  dementia
• Cognitive control over emotionally charged
  memories and feeling diminishes
• People with dementia remember things that society
  as a whole would prefer to forget

15
References

• Adams R (1977) The plague dogs. Harmondsworth
  Penguin
• Booth W C (1961) The rhetoric of fiction.
  Chicago University of Chicago Press
• Brown M and Clegg D eds (2007) Ancient
  Mysteries. London Trebus Projects
• Clegg D et al, eds (2010) Tell Mrs Mill her
  husband is still dead. London Trebus Projects.
• Dunmore H (1998) Your blue-eyed boy.
  Harmondsworth Penguin
• Gilbert S M and Gubar S (1974) The madwoman in
  the attic the woman writer and the nineteenth
  century literary imagination. New Haven and
  London Yale University Press.
• Jacoby R (1996) Social amnesia a critique of
  contemporary psychology. London Transaction
• Jordan H (2008) Mudbound. London Random
  House.
• Kennedy A L (2007) Day. London Jonathan Cape.
• Orulv L and Hyden L-C (2006) Confabulation
  sense-making, self-making and world-making in
  dementia. Discourse studies, 8 (5) 647-673.
• Waters S (2005) Fingersmith. London Virago