Adam A. Zych

This paper refers to the problem of care, help and support in terms of persons with dementia and points the issue of compassion fatigue and long-term involvement of patient’s family. It presents some suggestions of the German educator and psychologist Janina Steurenthaler to develop a new geragogics discipline Dementagogik, that is pedagogy directed at people with dementia. In this paper the author pays a particular attention to the basic aims of pedagogy of persons with dementia as a  subdiscipline of special geragogics, pointing to  demographic changes and the increasing number of persons suffering dementia, both in a global scale and in Poland. This article also provides the discussion on recommendations of the World Health Organization and the European Union experts that are aimed at protection and support of elderly people with chronic issues and their caregivers. The paper ends with the basic tasks for the implementation of the pedagogy of people with dementia, as well as the final conclusion that the “dementagogics” emerged in the European Year of the Brain (2014) and presents a vision of promoting – in the time of globalization – a dementia-friendly society.  

The subject of this paper is speech, language and communication of elderly people, which is sometimes marked by disease and/or by disability. European society is rapidly ageing. Thirty years ago Europe was named “oldish Europe”, today is “an old man of the world.” The Polish population today is “the most quickly ageing society in Europe…”. The paper presents real demographic, medical, and social problems – i.e. the health condition of the oldest generation. The last decades have brought a new gerontological and linguistic category called elderspeak. In vascular and neurodegenerational illnesses we have four “A”: Amnesia, Agnosia, Apraxia, and Aphasia. Aphasia makes difficult conversation and interpersonal communication. Paul Grice formulated many years ago the classic principles of cooperative conversation and communication: – the quantity of information, – the quality of information, that is the validity or the meaning of messages, and – reference, that is relation to a sick person. The paper ends with the conclusion that in the future it is necessary to create – on the ground of special geragogics – a new field of logopaedics – gerontologopaedics, and above all to create at Polish universities postgraduate studies in gerontologopaedics.