Exploring Creativity in Dementia Care: An Interview with Author John Killick

Why did you start writing about dementia?

When I gave up teaching full-time I began doing writing residencies, first in a women’s prison and then in a hospice, listening to the lives of residents and writing down their stories. A year in working for a private healthcare company and they asked whether I would do this with people living with dementia.

At this time, 25 years ago, dementia care was a little discussed topic. There was nothing really in the papers about dementia or on the TV and most people didn’t know anything about it. The healthcare company sent me to a care home where many of the residents had dementia and the manager said I would get “nothing out of anyone here”. But three months in, I had a meeting with the company, who decided I was onto something.

They made me a Writer in Residence and along with a grant from the Arts Council of Great Britain, I worked there for 10 years with those with dementia, writing their words down and sharing them back with them. Word got out about the work I was doing, and people started writing articles about it and it was even on the radio.

It was eventually picked up by Stirling University, where I then spent six years as a Research Fellow in Communication Through the Arts. My first book Communication and the Care of People with Dementia was published in 2001 by the Open University, and was a collaboration with psychologist Kate Allen – and since then I have written six more on dementia.

Are there any common themes through your books?

The common theme is communication – it has underlined everything I have written, from the first book to the latest. With dementia, communication is low on the priority list for many people – at the bottom, even.

In care home after care home you see it; people often getting little more than two and a half minutes’ a day to speak with another person. Most of the time care in such circumstances is very task-oriented.

People in their own homes have much more of a chance to communicate with family carers, but even then those carers are often at a loss as to how to do it, so they need a bit of help.

One of your books, Playfulness and Dementia, advocates humour for communicating with those with dementia. Is this one of the ways to help?

Playfulness is one aspect of that, yes. Even with people who still live in their own home, it all becomes so deadly serious and this is a problem that supporters of those with dementia come up against. The experience of dementia is often so fraught, and yet if we can be more playful we often find that people respond more positively.

Not everything is a problem to be solved. You can carry out tasks either in a serious or matter-of-fact way, of course – but people with dementia haven’t lost their sense of humour or indeed their sense of fun. You can make bits of the everyday a game – and why not?

Letting humour have its head can have unexpected benefits. ‘To truly laugh you must take your “pain” and play with it’ (as Chaplin said) – and there are plenty of examples in the book where people have injected playfulness into their communication to a positive effect.

As Elizabeth Cohen wrote in her novel The Family on Beartown Road, where the central protagonist looks after a father with Alzheimer’s, “I think that a sense of humour must be hidden very deep in the brain.” The idea that those with dementia don’t have a sense of humour is not really challenged – rather it is often ignored.

How can you include playfulness into your daily life?

Look out for any way you can create laughter, within reason. If something happens you can see it as a crisis or see it as the opposite and make someone laugh. And of course this is laughing with, never at the person with dementia.

People seem to think that there is nothing funny about dementia – of course there is. Everything about dementia can be out of the ordinary and if you turn your perspective in that direction the person will very often respond.

It’s is a gently humorous approach. It doesn’t necessarily depend on language either – it can be about movement or body language. People I have interacted with have lost their language and may not be able to get the humour of words but they can still understand the humour of situations. In some cases, we’ve just exchanged glances and fallen about laughing.

How essential is laughter for wellbeing?

Nothing is better than laughter to lift and relax. It releases endorphins, and there are many benefits on a holistic level. It’s certainly true that the more ground down in depression you are, the more unwell you are. If you can remain cheerful then you only help your health and wellbeing.