While existing scholarship on cognitive care narrative recognizes the potential of Theory of Mind (ToM), previous studies have limited scope. For example, cognitive scientist and narrative scholar Lisa Zunshine covers the discussion of the promising strategy of employing ToM for serving as cognitive tools for the well-being of chronically and terminally ill patients’ coming to terms of their life changes. Her view on mentally meta-representing others’ views, thoughts, and desires, be it effective or ineffective, touches on the potential of narrative to provide patients with cognitive care. In Why We Read Fiction (2006), Zunshine mentions the different ToM strategies employed misleadingly at various degrees by people with autism and those with schizophrenia. Expanding on existing scholarship, this panel sheds light on how ToM has the inherent accommodational function for serving as cognitive scaffolds for any patient suffering from cognitive challenges. It discusses what ToM can do for the health benefits of cognitively-challenged patients.
In recent years, narrative care has manifested in prose-only literary works as well as graphic narratives. In the cases of dementia narratives, works such as Tangles, Dementia 21, and My Degeneration testify to the power of (graphic) narrative as a form to elicit patients’ agency in their interaction with dementia. As the presentations demonstrate, the act of storytelling is therapeutic, in terms of forming new communities and honoring the agents’ own voices, which both Arthur Frank and Rita Charon discussed in their groundbreaking works.
Since care is a process of exchange, observation, and adjustment, caregivers’ voices are also to be heard and valued. In Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass, Alice is a mother, a patient, and a survivor of the Armenian genocide; Dana is a daughter, a caregiver, and a medical anthropologist. Their complicated relationship as well as lived and imagined experiences, embodied in intertextual and intervisual fragments, provides a nuanced case of how cognitive care narrative reveals what is otherwise invisible via the lens of narrative medicine.
Another voice and our panelist’s advocacy of this interactive media comes from that of a different means of communication. Unlike dementia patients who need cognitive scaffolding strategies from wisdom of narrative medicine including ToM to manage their symptoms of cognitive decline, affirmation card decks such as “By Your Side” mission designed for taking care of cancer patients aim at a different group. The cognitive care provided by means of narrative medicine is literalized in their case; the patients' embodied experiences with cancer are made manifest via interactive narrative intervention, and the disruption of those patients’ self-perception otherwise concealed are thus made visible during the intervention.
The voice that makes our panel even more “diversified in unity” is that of setting narrative’s representational feature against the backdrop of medical imaging. If medical imaging provides care for patients by accurately revealing what is otherwise hidden from plain sight, why can’t narrative serve similar functions of making visible patients’ mental picture that is otherwise left in the dark? The discussion is back to dementia patients’ better cognitive care. If what ToM can offer according to Lisa Zunshine is the support for agents to better imagine, mentally digest, react to, and keep a more effective record of others’ emotions, thoughts and desires, what a newer form of therapy through narrative with the integration of ToM can do for dementia patients is to provide a personal “virtual growth journal” externalized in narrative, where the accountability buddy to take in and keep track of “what agents’ ever-updating mental representations of emotions, thoughts and desires are”, becomes themselves.
Above is a brief description of our individual projects. Presentations and respondent remarks will be timed and monitored by the panel moderator to ensure at least 15 minutes of unstructured discussion. When the moderator is presenting, a fellow presenter is to serve as alternative moderator.