Art as Therapy: nurturing well-being and relationships for people with dementia by Teresa Amaral Beshwate, MPH, and Keith Kasin, MHA

In the book Beyond Forgetting, poet and essayist Holly J. Hughes describes her mother’s decline from Alzheimer’s disease as “a slow process of subtraction, as we lost her one brain cell, one synapse at a time.” Family and friends of those living with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia would likely agree. As a person with dementia slowly loses memory, personality traits, skills and expressive abilities, loved ones face the difficult task of adjusting to an ever-evolving state of “normal.” Relationships can begin to break down as the ability to converse about familiar topics and shared experiences fades away. To expand on Hughes’s concept, relationships are also subject to that slow process of subtraction.