Let me grow old and senile in peace: Norwegian newspaper accounts of voice and agency with dementia

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis study analyses the remaking of dementia as a social and cultural phenomenon in the public media discourse in a welfare state Norway. A content analysis was carried out of articles on dementia published in Norwegian paper media from 1995 to 2015. The study combined the tools from quantitative corpus analyses and qualitative critical discourse analyses, making it possible to detect and interpret diachronic changes in the dementia discourse. Although the main focus in Norwegian dementia discourse has changed from the disease to the personhood, the agents defining what it means to live well with dementia continued to be predominantly institutional: non-governmental organisations, municipalities, health-care institutions and politicians. An analysis of the uses of the politically incorrect Norwegian term for dementia, ‘senility’, revealed that this term offered an alternative to the institutionalised dementia discourse and functioned as an unconventional and therapeutic-free space where older people and persons with dementia could use humour to subvert these norms and power relations.