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One in three of us born in the UK this year will develop dementia in our lifetime (Lewis, 2015). One in fourteen of us over sixty-five has dementia in the UK and one in seventy-nine of the whole population (Prince et al., 2014).
These numbers are expected to grow rapidly in the next decades as our UK population ages.
The Alzheimer's Society defines “dementia” as a progressive disease of “a group of symptoms that include problems with memory, thinking or language and changes in mood, emotions, perception and behaviour”. The Society further goes on to say that dementia is “not a natural part of ageing” but is caused as the progression of the condition damages nerve cells in the brain (www.alzheimers.org.uk/about-dementia/types-dementia/what-is-dementia).
Dementia: An Attachment Approach, when written as “Dementia” refers to the book as opposed to “dementia”, the disease.
Coming from a place of truth and heart, Dementia: An Attachment Approach was not for me an easy read. I took over two years to come back to the book. I started reading it in 2019 and put it down—”I wonder if I should be handing this off to someone else? Should I?” Forgetting: leaving the fire burning on a gas ring on the stove, forgetting my car keys at a petrol station, Dementia book review is on my mind. Like some of the people written about, I had even managed to forget that I was supposed to be doing this book review such is the nature of Dementia, dementia!
At the time of writing this review in May 2022, Dementia: An Attachment Approach (2019) is a welcome, relevant monograph on this subject. Borne out of the 2014 conference “Attachment, memory loss and ageing”, Dementia represents an important and therapeutic contribution on a subject “very frightening, apparently confronting us with the prospect of ‘losing our brain’” (, cited in Cotter, 2019, p. 1), “our mind” (, cited in Cotter, 2019, p. 2), and “the loss of what makes us uniquely human” (, quoted in Cotter, 2019, p. 2).
In March 2022, I find mysel