ABSTRACT
In a paper published in the Lancet in 2010, Daniel George wrote: ‘The everyday language we use to describe dementia shapes our perceptions of brain ageing and even contributes to what has been called the “social death” of those most severely affected’ (2010, p. 586). He goes on to argue that not only does the language used about dementia ‘guide feelings of enmity and fear’, but it also leads to dementia being seen ‘as something external of us’. In identifying the contribution of language to the construction of the social death of people with dementia, George helps situate the concerns of this paper which are to consider the nature of the social identity attributed to mentally frail old people, what we have termed the ‘social imaginary’ of the fourth age. In particular, we are interested in examining whether the fourth age, conceived in this way, necessarily condemns people to ‘social death’ and therefore places them outside of social relations (Higgs & Gilleard, 2015). This question is important because the idea of the social death of the person with dementia is one which is increasingly rejected in most contemporary accounts of the social relations surrounding dementia in favour of positions supporting the continuing role of ‘personhood’ (Dewing, 2008; Kitwood, 1997). For those advocating a personhood approach, the difficulty with the concept of social death is that it implies the loss of personhood while the individual with dementia is alive and therefore deprives him or her of their ‘human rights’.
