Applied Health Humanities for the Aging: Activities for Home and Institutional Caregivers

This book provides a collection of interventions from researchers’ and clinicians’ health humanities experiences, and makes their methods available to home and institutional caregivers to aid interactions with the elderly, particularly persons diagnosed with dementia.

As a revolutionary perspective connecting medical training and treatment with lessons from the humanities, medical humanities emphasizes the treatment and care of disease, the "science of the human," and offers an integrated approach to health professional education that include lessons from comparative religion, history, literature, philosophy, the visual and performing arts.

Highlighting the needs of persons with dementia and their caregivers, this compilation shows how the arts can play a primary role in empowering families and communities to offer creative and meaningful care within their own homes and communities. Each chapter provides an overview of a specific creative application (reading and commonplacing; storytelling; intergenerational musical activities; Bingocize®; haiku making; and animatronic pet activities), the evidence-based support for its benefits, and clear and accessible instructions for the reader. These methods offer insightful approaches to care in which skills such as active listening can provide in-roads to patient experiences as well as an array of creative approaches to ameliorate the physical and mental consequences of isolation and loneliness that too often accompany aging and disease.

This text will be of interest to healthcare workers and allied health professionals, healthcare administrators and family members.

Trini Stickle, PhD, is an applied linguist at Western Kentucky University. She primarily focuses on factors that negatively affect persons’ access to meaningful interaction, including individuals diagnosed with dementia or autism and English language learners. Her work identifies barriers unique to each group and the strategies needed to overcome these difficulties. Stickle is also investigating the aging experiences of immigrant and refugee populations living in southern regions of the US.

Lorna E. Segall, PhD, MT-BC, is associate professor and director of music therapy at the University of Louisville. Her research and project development explores intergenerational programming and music in prisons. Additionally, she engages her students in this work in an effort to promote understanding, compassion and humanizing with respect to often misunderstood and underserved populations.