Blogging through dementia: Reworking mainstream discourse through metaphor in online early-onset dementia narratives

The depiction of dementia in public discourse tends to operate on two levels: the tragedy discourse or the living well with dementia discourse, where metaphors play a decisive role in the characterization of the condition and the voice of those living with the condition is usually underrepresented.

This article analyzes whether and how mainstream discourse on dementia is reworked in first-person accounts of the disease online and explores the attitudes and assumptions about dementia that illness blogs reflect and defy.

Drawing on Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the article analyzes a corpus of 10 blogs (622 posts) written by individuals living with early-onset dementia to identify the metaphors used to depict dementia, its impact on the self and its social and relational aspects. Metaphor identification was based on the PRAGGLEJAZ metaphor identification procedure.

The study demonstrates that across blogs no single metaphor alone is capable of capturing the complexity of the dementia experience; instead multiple metaphors are deployed to provide a characterization of the multiple faces of this condition. In this way blogs transcend and reshape the reductionist view of dementia that emerges from the either/or dichotomy of the tragedy versus living well with dementia discourses that dominate in media representations. By reshaping some of the metaphors used in mainstream discourse and introducing new ones, blog narratives draw attention to the complex nature of the experience of dementia, acknowledging both the suffering and social and functional losses that the condition brings, while also claiming recognition for personhood, agency, validation, and the aspiration to grow beyond the diagnosis and live a valued life as part of a family and community.

Overall, this study demonstrates that metaphor is a useful tool for providing insights into people's experience of dementia and that blogs are a platform where stereotypes may be defied and mainstream representations of dementia reworked offering a more holistic view of the condition and granting narrative agency to those who live with dementia.