Prattling TV

"Edith", featured in my previous post, has a line about the telly "prattling to itself in a corner".  This reminds me of the not-very-old postmaster in a village whose little church I once served: he'd contracted Alzheimer's and was at the point of needing residential care.  His wife had already had to take the car keys off him - he can drive OK, she said, but if he meets an oncoming vehicle on a narrow lane, he won't be able to deal with it.  (Dementia is about losing not just your memory, but familiar competencies as well.)  More recently he'd been getting irritated by the television.  "Why is that man shouting at me?" he asked his wife in some distress.  That one, I have to admit, has passed into our household language and is our standard phrase for complaining that the TV is on too loud.  It illustrates how dementia sufferers misconstrue their surroundings and respond inappropriately.  For this poor man, the TV screen was no longer there and the man he could see was a real presence in his own living room, shouting at him.

Dementia ward staff, care home assistants, know this or damn well should, it's basic: patients lose their ability to interpret TV programmes and may find them unsettling, with the rapid movement of images and cutting from scene to scene.  Yet so often I visit a ward or a care home and find the infernal machine switched on, blaring away, usually with no-one watching or, if they are, failing to grasp what's going on.  There may be a place for TV as reminiscence, familiar old films or "memory lane" documentaries, or maybe for gentle nature programmes, but much of the time the box is switched on without a thought of its impact on patients - rather a poor do in what should be a therapeutic environment.

It occurs to me to ask if tv programmes have been made, not about dementia - plenty of those in recent years - but for dementia sufferers.  Googling brings up this one almost at once, confirming my reservations about the box:

"Engaging in a hobby like reading a book, making a patchwork quilt or even playing computer games can delay the onset of dementia, a US study suggests.

 

Watching TV however does not count - and indeed spending significant periods of time in front of the box may speed up memory loss, researchers found."  (BBC website, 18 Feb 2009)

That's not what I was after.  However, surfing failed to identify any therapeutic application of the medium, which is revealing in itself.  Music therapy, drama, dance, art therapy, yes: TV therapy, no.  Switch the damn thing off, let's play dominoes.  Might not sound as thrilling, but it could actually be better for the brain.

On the wider subject of the damage that TV does to our personal development, from childhood up, this is a provocatively argued piece.