How Do Cultural Narratives Shape the Lives of People Living with Dementia? Insights from Humanities Research

“Dementia” is a collective term for a group of common, aging-associated, progressively debilitating, ultimately terminal conditions that affect a person's thought, memory, speech, and behavior. Dementia challenges ideas about the self, about social relationships, and about how aging societies should respond to the needs of people living with dementia and to the needs of dementia caregivers. This introduction to a collection of original essays and a roundtable explains how cultural narratives shape the experience of living with dementia, for better or worse. Cultural narratives are stories that a society or cultural group shares to make meaning, and these stories may reveal common values and fears. This introduction offers examples of how cultural narratives work and highlights insights from research by bioethics and humanities scholars and by humanities researchers in the social sciences. This introduction also provides an overview of the collection, which includes pieces that highlight innovative community projects that demonstrate how stories affect public understanding about what it means to live with dementia.