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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Mentalization in dementia care
— an autoethnographic account of a project worker's experiences | | Author(s) | Bethany Luxmoore, Phil McEvoy |
| Journal title | Working with Older People, vol 21, no 3, 2017 |
| Publisher | Emerald, 2017 |
| Pages | pp 147-156 |
| Source | http://www.emeraldinsight.com/loi/wwop |
| Keywords | Dementia ; Mental health [elderly] ; Emotions ; Engagement ; Attitude ; Social interaction ; Management [care] ; Qualitative Studies. |
| Annotation | Mentalization is a psychodynamic concept that can help us to understand our emotional responses to others. This paper illustrates how the concept of mentalization may be applied in dementia care. It is an autoethnographic account of the first author's experiences working as a project manager, in which she used the concept of mentalization to pay close attention to how her emotional responses to people with dementia influenced their communicative interactions. This paper outlines how the first author processed her own internal experiences in both mentalizing and non-mentalizing modes, as she wrestled with feelings of conscious incompetence. In the non-mentalizing mode, she was pre-occupied with her own anxieties. She struggled to relate to or make sense of the experiences of the individuals with advanced dementia with whom she engaged. Moving towards a mentalizing stance helped her to attune to the embodied experiences of the people with dementia and to recognise the reciprocal nature of our communicative interactions. This paper illustrates the role that mentalization may play in developing natural and authentic strategies to support communicative engagement in dementia care. These strategies may be of potential value to family carers. Family carers who can maintain a mentalizing stance may be more able to respond in empathic, person-centred ways to people who are living with dementia. On the other hand, non-mentalizing responses may be a root cause of misunderstanding and emotional disengagement. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-170922235 A |
| Classmark | EA: D: DL: DN: DP: TMA: QA: 3DP |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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