Effect of imagining God’s perspective on perceptions of personhood in dementia

Abstract

Although people do not explicitly deny that individuals with dementia are human, their treatment of individuals with dementia reveals a subtle denial of full personhood (Doyle & Rubinstein, 2014). There has been a movement advocating for individuals with dementia to be treated as persons instead of as individuals defined by their disease (Kitwood, 1997; Norman, 1996). Efforts to preserve the personhood of individuals with dementia will become more critical as this population is expected to dramatically increase from 4.7 million as estimated in 2010 to 13.8 million by 2050 (Hebert et al., 2013).