Making sense of the stories that people with Alzheimer's tell: a journey with my mother.
Confabulation or pseudo-reminiscence of the sort produced by people with Alzheimer's is reconsidered by applying existing theories about the structure of narrative and work on reminiscence, and the construction of a life story to the stories told by the author's mother. This approach provides the basis for going beyond a negative estimate of confabulatory stories based on their apparent confusion of past and present, truth and fantasy, to a more positive estimate of them as complying with the norms of narrative, and as being functional for their teller as a means both of interaction and of reconstructing an identity. It also allows for identification of certain predominant themes, which may help one to grasp the general sense of such stories.
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D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000451:nursing / Q000523:psychology*; D001325:Autobiographies as Topic; D008192:Deception; D005190:Family / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008568:Memory; D015404:Nursing Methodology Research; D012649:Self Concept