In her November 27 article, Is art therapy the answer for dementia? Making music, painting, or dancing — and seeing or hearing it — may be the most effective treatment for dementia to date, Karen Weintraub has really gotten a sense of the effectiveness of the arts in dementia care. I had some additional thoughts on re-reading the article.
The article begins with "Carla shook a tambourine, while Dorothy played the xylophone and Leni tapped her palms gently on an African drum. Vivian declined an instrument, but shimmied her shoulders when the music moved her." With the exception of Dorothy playing, the other verbs used to describe what the folks were doing are all verbs describing movement - shook, tapped, and shimmied. Often staff and family members who see me work, think that I am a music therapist, because they see me using music to stimulate movement. What they don't realize is that in addition to using music, a dance movement therapist brings movement observation, exposure to multiple dance forms, and dance/movement therapy skills to expand upon the movement that people are already doing. In other words, I might try to get Carla to shake in other ways, make the movement larger, smaller, up high or down low so as to involve more of her body, thus increasing the amount of liveliness and investment in what she is doing.
What I, and Sally Harrison, are doing are not classes, but rather groups, and specifically therapy groups. I say this because people frequently are unaware that a group is something other than a collection of individuals sitting in the same general area, perhaps focused on the same thing at the same time. We are using our knowledge and understanding of group dynamics to build upon the participants' sense of group, which ultimately will result in greater or lesser feelings of safety, their connection to one another, and increased level of self-expression.
I love John Zeisel's statement,
"It’s a human rights issue that everybody needs to be able to have a life”.
I wish there would be a huge pause here and recognition of this fact. People should not be warehoused. I am ashamed to say that people with dementia are still being warehoused. I was in a facility the other day and witnessed older adults sitting with their heads drooped onto their chests, left to their own devices. To my mind, this is reprehensible. What ever happened to the commandment, "Honor thy father and thy mother"? These older adults are ALL OF OUR FATHERS AND OUR MOTHERS.
"Even people who were not artistic or music lovers in their youth can be inspired by the sound of a song they heard on their first date, or by a painting that evokes an emotion, the speakers said."
This reminds me of Mrs. D., a woman with whom I worked for several months, who said one day, "I was overweight all of my life. I would never have considered dancing. Look at me now. I'm 93 and just beginning to dance."
“We don’t lose the ability to express joy,” added her colleague, Dee Brenner, Artz program coordinator."
That is for sure. I see that every time I run a group. Stop for a moment and look people in the eye with love. You will see joy in response.
“When you are cared for, you lose your sense of who you are,” he said. “Everybody with dementia has a lot going for them. They can experience, they can be present, and they can develop.”
One of my underlying tenets is that it's essential to acknowledge our mutual interdependence for our health and well-being (and that of our society). I like to give the residents with whom I work the opportunity to give and to see themselves as contributors. I may ask them to brush some dirt off of me, or thank them for brushing my hair out of my eyes. To rub the hand lotion into my hands, just as I do to their hands. For our health and well-being, for balance, as caregivers, we need to give and to RECEIVE. That takes the willingness to be vulnerable, which takes tremendous strength and courage in the mainstream American culture.
“Whether it be fine arts, music, listening to music, going to museums. All those things do not have an impact on the disease per se. What they do most likely is they get through to the person with Alzheimer’s by exploiting the areas of the brain which are least impaired,” said [Robert Stern, professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Boston University], also the director of BU’s Alzheimer’s Disease Center’s Clinical Core. “Anything that can touch the patient through that network of brain [areas] can have a profound impact.”
My understanding of neuroscience and the brain is very primitive. At the same time, I can extrapolate from my understanding that in coronary artery disease, it sometimes happens that where there is arterial blockage, the body may spontaneously generate new arteries. I believe that exercise may have helped to create those new pathways. I believe this is one miracle that is the body's self-healing. Similarly, I believe that given certain circumstances, neurogenesis occurs
In her workshop and abstract, Gene Expression and Neuroplasticity: Implications for Dance/Movement Therapy and Alzheimer’s Disease presented at the American Dance Therapy Association’s 2010 Conference, Lora Wilson Mau offered:
"Research ... supports that certain types
of physical, sensory and social experiences can maintain brain
plasticity and increase neurogenesis. Building on the anecdotal and clinical literature that supports the use of dance/movement therapy with individuals with dementia, this workshop [Gene Expression and Neuroplasticity: Implications for Dance/Movement Therapy and Alzheimer’s Disease] introduces Ernest Rossi’s
concept of “psychosocial genomics” and integrates the language of
neuroscience to more concretely explain what can happen on a molecular
level during a DMT session and why that may be particularly significant
in the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease (Wilson-Mau,
2010)."
In the Boston Globe article, Weintraub also shares a story from Alan O'Hare:
He described one nursing home resident he had largely ignored because
she spent most of the day doing nothing but moving her eyes diagonally
up and down. He decided to ask her about it. “I’m dancing all day,” she
told him. Hearing that “changed my whole relationship with her,” O’Hare
said.
In O'Hare's workshop, he told that story. As he showed us this person's movement, which was minute, it was easy to understand why she was mostly ignored. O'Hare finally asked this woman what she was doing, to which she responded, “I’m dancing all day” and then, "and when I get tired, I rest". It seemed as though all she was moving was her neck, head and eyes. The "rest of the story" is that O'Hare then used her "dancing all day" as the theme for a project that a group of residents and O'Hare worked on and, I believe, ultimately performed.
This is the beauty of using the arts with people with dementia and Alzheimer's ~ to see, hear, feel their responses and to make much of them. This is quietly beautiful and powerful work. I am grateful to call this my life work.
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