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Advances in Psychiatric Treatment (2003) 9: 439-445
© 2003 The Royal College of Psychiatrists

Dementia and literature

Christopher A. Vassilas

Christopher Vassilas has been a consultant in old age psychiatry for the past 9 years. He works at the Queen Elizabeth Psychiatric Hospital (Mindelsohn Way, Birmingham B15 2QZ, UK), where he is also the Director of Medical Education.

As we doctors are beginning to understand more and more about dementia, the public has become increasingly aware of the condition and in turn this has been reflected in the arts. This article discusses four books whose main focus is the experience of dementia, each written from an entirely different perspective: a novel giving a first-person account of dementia by the Dutch writer J. Bernlef; a biography of the famous novelist Iris Murdoch by her husband John Bayley; Linda Grant’s account of her mother’s multi-infarct dementia (which also describes Jewish migration to the UK two generations ago); and Michael Igniateff’s autobiographical novel Scar Tissue. Such accounts, offering insights into how patients and carers feel, cannot but help make us better doctors.




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