Nostalgia Therapy

Furthermore, this essay demonstrates the dilemmas that people are faced with when they have Alzheimer’s Disease, focusing on the stigma around Alzheimer’s Disease.

The theme of The Theft of Memory is somewhat of a social commentary, a personal and medical analysis of Alzheimer’s disease. Jonathan Kozol discusses his father’s decent into Alzheimer’s from his own point of view and how the experience related to their family as a whole. He shares his grief and suffering along with celebrating the impact that his father had on so many people throughout his lifetime. Jonathan tells stories from his father’s past to illustrate what an incredible doctor and amazing man he truly was. The documentation of his father’s illness is something that many people can relate to within their own families. As his illness progresses, Dr. Kozol tries to diagnose and treat himself at first before relinquishing that control to another doctor. Jonathan did everything in his power to maintain his father’s dignity throughout his life. The book documents the impact of Alzheimer’s disease on their family and tests the limits of Jonathan’s devotion to his parents.

It is when we experience discontinuity in our life, such as the death of or sudden separation from a loved one, that nostalgia may come into play. Ironically, while we combat feelings of sadness or mourning by allowing our minds to re-live moments when our lives felt more whole, we are also reminding ourselves of what we have lost. Nostalgia is not just a search for the past within the mnemonic, but also within the temporal, ‘a yearning for a different time- the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our

Nostalgia lives in our veins, we breath and vision it all the time. Nostalgia was a disease throughout the early 1700’s, was coined with a mixture of Greek words of returning home and pain: Throughout the war, nostalgic were affecting the troops over the scale of homesick to perform their duties and the only option to recover the troop was by sending them back home. Now nostalgia has influenced modern day as generations expresses time back at their “good old days”, wishing that they could flashback. Nostalgic has even swayed the media perceptive as recreating their old films or shows in the new modern days to fill the gap of their childhood, and showing their children their favorite shows on television when they were a kid.

Individuals with prefrontal lesions usually display emotional, social and moral deficits (Elinger 2003). Social

Reminiscence therapy is a positive pastime for people with dementia and there is a evidence to suggest that the process is helpful in improving overall psychological wellbeing and in preventing further psychological deterioration. The purpose of the study is to observe the methods of Alzheimer’s disease treatment and help those people to recollect the memories from the past. The research shows that there are several ways in making possible for Alzheimer’s patients to get better in their daily activities as per my own experience similar to this disease. According to the researcher Alan, accounts for 42 percent of cases, and 1 in 9 Americans over 65 of age has Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia. I was very surprise with the result because

. These personality changes in these patients are similar to the changes found in psychopaths. Antoni Damasio and his teams highlights this similarity as they were able to show a 16 percent reduction in the volume of the right ventromedial prefrontal cortex (Raine, 148-149). This structurel impairment to the ventral region of the prefrontal cortex is particularly implicated in antisocial, psychopathic behavior (Raine pg 148-149]). Antonio Damasio was also able to associate this deformation in the ventral prefrontal cortex with an array of deficits in emotion and decision making, lack of guilt, shame and empathy, poor planning, irresponsibility, and irritability. Experimental studies were able to reveal that both neurological damaged patients and psychopaths exhibited reduced emotional charged stimuli, defects in economic decision-making skills, deficits in reversal learning and moral judgment impairment (Koenigs, 2012). Blair’s research also supports these findings as he was able to prove his argument that the integrated functioning of the vmPFC enables the basics of care-based morality and dysfunction within the region in psychopathy means that reinforcement-based decision making, including moral and economic decision making, are impaired

They found out that not all patients with neurodegenerative diseases had personality identities loss but it does most affect perceived identity. Their results showed that frontotemporal dementia has the greatest effect on perceived identity and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis has the least. While Alzheimer’s disease had more identity disruption and also shows different changes in daily function compared to the other in their moral identity. “We further demonstrated that perceived identity change fully mediates the impact of neurodegenerative disease on relationship deterioration between patient and caregiver.” (Strohminger & Nichols, 2015). (A) Based off of the data and results they concluded it was best if they shared their findings with the public. Psychologists Strohminger and Nichols decided to write an article in The New York Times about their

(Hassabis et al., 2007), has recently been shown to be impaired in patients with vmPFC damage (Bertossi et al., 2016). A classic hallmark of vmPFC damage is altered moral decision making (Ciaramelli et al., 2007, 2012; Koenigs et al., 2007; Thomas et al., 2011).

In all humans’ brains, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is the determining factor for empathy, morals, and emotions. The problem comes when the PFC is damaged, which causes alterations in the mental state. University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health reveals that the damage to this part of the brain is due to reduced structural integrity and less activity in the PFC, determined by diffusor tensor images (DTI) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Because doctors determine the behavioral integrity of a person by the function of their PFC, it is the main focus for determining psychopathic tendencies (“Psychopaths’ Brain Show Differences in Structure and Function”). So psychiatrists are now able to examine an MRI of a brain and look at the prefrontal cortex to determine if they have a higher liability of having behavioral inconsistencies or psychopathic qualities, therefore providing a visual confirmation of a mental deformity. Robert M.

Anybody may be capable of telling a story, however, all stories obtain uniqueness within how the story has been told. Whether a story regarding the Vietnam War, World War I, World War II, or several different events, contains various effects dealing with the particular event. The population may not realize that Alzheimer’s might be a popular event to question someone, since dealing with Alzheimer’s may be tragic. Not all stories dealing with Alzheimer’s may be tragic, a few may be a pleasurable experience.

Alzheimer’s was recognized over 100 years ago in a German psychiatric textbook. The perception has since undergone many transformations while it continues to evolve with implications to cultural placement and clinical for those diagnosed. Dr. Alzheimer was the first to discover, established during a post-mortem, tangles and high concentrations of plaque as well as a scarceness of cells in the cerebral cortex. Prior to this discovery, the world classified Alzheimer’s as a mental disorder. Even though there is a biological basis to the disease, many, including the field of neurology, have confronted the APA on their etiology. The concept that dementia is a mental illness is being challenged due to the social stigma of having a mental

Our identity is tied to our brain and our brain is tied to our body. Because the ability to recall memories, goals, etc. is gone, the person is too. We also experience this same type of situation when it comes to Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia. The important part of what makes us who we are is our brain and with Alzheimer's your brain loses its cognitive abilities resulting in the death of a person’s identity.

Identity issue are an indicative class of psychiatric issues that influence around 10% of the population. This gathering of these issues can be described by strange patterns; issues with enthusiastic direction; and trouble accomplishing a harmony amongst suddenness and motivation control. The reasoning behind many personality disorders are unverifiable. In various cases, it becomes clear there are both organic and psychosocial elements that impact the improvement of identity and identity issue.

Identity and humanity are two integral parts of the make-up of a functioning member of society, in the sense that to be a functioning member of society one can be able to be an individual with their own “self” and their own ability to relate to others. That is just a simple abridged definition of what I plan to explain in full detail in this paper. I will define identity, humanity, what a functioning member of society really is, how those two aspects play into that, and the how short term memory and long term memory play the biggest role in our identity and humanity. By looking at the definitions of short term and long term memory, one can see that the two function is in separate parts of the brain, so one when is damaged, ideally, the other remains intact. What most observers don’t see is that identity and humanity are so heavily influenced by memory. This is important because to what degree is the identity and humanity of an individual retained when they lose their short term or long term memory? I plan to argue that identity is retained more when an individual suffers from _____ term memory loss and that humanity is retained more when an individual suffers from _____ term memory loss. Some will argue that there are different degrees of these different memory losses and that each should be looked at in a case by case basis. But, I plan to argue that this a more general spectrum and that it doesn’t need to be looked case by case because I’m looking at short term and long