Browsing by Subject "Mind"

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    Alzheimer's Disease Narratives and the Myth of Human Being
    (2012-12-11) Rieske, Tegan Echo; Schultz, Jane E.; Johnson, Karen Ramsay; Tilley, John J.
    The ‘loss of self’ trope is a pervasive shorthand for the prototypical process of Alzheimer's disease (AD) in the popular imagination. Turned into an effect of disease, the disappearance of the self accommodates a biomedical story of progressive deterioration and the further medicalization of AD, a process which has been storied as an organic pathology affecting the brain or, more recently, a matter of genetic calamity. This biomedical discourse of AD provides a generic framework for the disease and is reproduced in its illness narratives. The disappearance of self is a mythic element in AD narratives; it necessarily assumes the existence of a singular and coherent entity which, from the outside, can be counted as both belonging to and representing an individual person. The loss of self, as the rhetorical locus of AD narrative, limits the privatization of the experience and reinscribes cultural storylines---storylines about what it means to be a human person. The loss of self as it occurs in AD narratives functions most effectively in reasserting the presence of the human self, in contrast to an anonymous, inhuman nonself; as AD discourse details a loss of self, it necessarily follows that the thing which is lost (the self) always already existed. The private, narrative self of individual experience thus functions as proxy to a collective human identity predicated upon exceptionalism: an escape from nature and the conditions of the corporeal environment.
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    Clay Work as a Mindfulness-Based Practice
    (2019) Vespini, Sarah; Leigh, Heather
    This single subject study sought to explore the potential connection between Clay Work and components of mindfulness using the State Mindfulness Scale for Clay Work (SMS-CW). The study was done by an art therapy graduate student, who was the sole participant of the three week-long study. The researcher was not kept to a time limit when working with clay, and after every session completed the SMS-CW. It was hypothesized that the researcher’s self-reported scores on the SMS-CW taken after working with clay would show a connection between Clay Work and the components of mindfulness measured by this instrument. Key finding indicated the potential for Clay Work to promote similar benefits as mindfulness based practices.