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Social Engineering Dementia

posted by n1 on Sunday August 21 2016, @03:05AM   
from the repeat-reassure-and-redirect dept.

quietus writes:

The other day I was having a consult at the psychogeriatric ward of a local hospital. While we were discussing a CT scan of my father's brain, the psychiatrist mentioned that his ward was really aimed at reshaping disruptive behaviour -- like painting the bathroom with excrement -- of patients with dementia (pdf).

Thinking the conversation over, this sounds a bit like social engineering -- which makes me wonder: have other Soylentils been in a position where they've taken care of an elderly parent, and what psychological principles did you apply to moderate/shape behaviour?

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Original Submission

• Re:We used the Bus Stop trick after we moved my mo (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday August 21 2016, @08:34PM

  by darkfeline (1030) on Sunday August 21 2016, @08:34PM (#391209) Homepage

  That's a dangerous line of philosophy to pursue, because how do you know how *anyone* else feels? Maybe everything you do is pissing everyone else off but there's a big conspiracy to keep you out of the loop, and you're living in a fake social bubble.

  Here's a quote from The Grand Design:

  A few years ago the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved goldfish bowls. The measure's sponsor explained the measure in part by saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality? Might not we ourselves be inside some big goldfish bowl and have our vision distorted by an enormous lens? The goldfish's picture of reality is different from ours, but can we be sure it is less real?  

  The goldfish view is not the same as our own, but goldfish could still formulate scientific laws governing the motion of the objects they observe outside their bowl. For example, due to the distortion, a freely moving object that we would observe to move in a straight line would be observed by the goldfish to move along a curved path. Nevertheless, the goldfish could formulate scientific laws from their distorted frame of reference that would always hold true and that would enable them to make predictions about the future motion of objects outside the bowl. Their laws would be more complicated than the laws in our frame, but simplicity is a matter of taste. If a goldfish formulated such a theory, we would have to admit the goldfish's view as a valid picture of reality.

   

  We can only assume, based on how we perceive reality and our own knowledge, that dementia and the expected sense of helplessness that accompanies it is suffering, but it is only so much "guessing" as everything we do and know is "guessing".

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