Whose Story? On how to create narratives of dementia and the self

Location: City, University of London, Room A130, College Building Entrance (Map)

This panel brings together service users, health care professionals and artists who are working to support those with dementia to create narratives of self. Faced with challenges to a sense of ‘who you are’, and ‘who you might become’, our panellists explore how such concepts might be adapted or preserved through the process of storytelling.  This session is open to anyone who is either working in this area, caring for someone with dementia or living with the illness themselves.

The Panelists

Clare Allan (chair) lectures in creative writing at City, University of London. A former service user, she has written extensively on matters relating to mental health. Her novel, Poppy Shakespeare, a satire on mental health services, was short-listed for numerous awards, including Mind Book of the Year, the Guardian First Book Award and the Orange Prize for new writers. She writes a column for The Guardian on issues concerning mental health, which has been running since 2006.

Tracey Shorthouse, aged 48, is diagnosed with Posterior Cortical Atrophy and Early Onset of Alzheimer’s Disease. A retired community staff nurse, she is the author of I Am Still Me, a poetry collection and is involved with a variety of dementia projects and organisations such as Dementia UK’s Lived Experience Advisory Panel (LEAP), Dementia Action Alliances (DAA),  the Dementia Engagement and Empowerment Project (DEEP) and The Angela Project.

Toby Williamson is an independent consultant working in the fields of adult and older people’s mental health, dementia, mental capacity, and safeguarding. He has many years’ experience of working in and managing frontline mental health services, research, evaluation, practice and service development, and policy work, and for the last ten years has particularly focused on dementia and the Mental Capacity Act. Toby has co-authored a book on mental health and mental capacity legislation and is currently co-authoring a book on rights, values and dementia.

Susanna Howard is a writer, actor and theatre maker who founded and runs the arts, literature & dementia charity Living Words.  Living Words run care home residency programmes working one-to-one with people experiencing dementias and the staff who work with them. Susanna is currently Visiting Research Fellow at Roehampton University Poetry Centre.

Ernesto Priego is a lecturer at the Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design at City, University of London and the Editor of The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship. Ernesto has worked in partnership with Dr Simon Grennan of the University of Chester, Dr Peter Wilkins of Douglas College, Vancouver, Canada, an NHS Trust, and colleagues from HCID, leading the team to produce Parables of Care, that uses comics as a medium to evoke the kind of de-structured and re-structured experience of time that is akin to dementia, to illness, ageing and caring. If you live in the UK you can request printed copies at no cost here.

The panel will be followed by a reception for all guests.