ABSTRACT
The term dementia has never been a uniform concept pointing to a wellestablished entity of human behaviour; that has to do with, among other things, how human behaviour in general is valued, and the process of valuing changes over time. In this way also the valuing of deviant or abnormal human behaviour changes, together with the ‘right’ or ‘good’ way of coping with it. From a certain perspective, at a certain period in time, the only, or right, way of coping with deviant human behaviour was not to cope with it; to isolate people as soon as possible; to get them out of (our) sight, so that we did not have to see them. So the valuing was not relational.
