Awareness Weeks

Rabbit, Parkinsons, Dyslexia, Deaf, Brain, Business Continuity, Mental Illness, Salt, MS, Eating Disorder, Asexual, and Alcohol are, believe or not,the first dozen hits resulting from a Google search on * Awareness Week.  Who would have thought it?  Alcohol one might have predicted, cancer certainly (though why male rather than cancer in general?  one might have thought Breast would be more prominent, if that's the word...) and maybe even Parkinsons.  I'm glad that Mental Illness makes the top ten.  But Rabbit Awareness Week as the no.1?  Someone has been manipulating Google to produce that outcome, surely. 

Further down the list - I am not making this up - are awareness weeks for Ragwort, Compost, Groundwater, Capitalism, Orangutan, Encephalitis, Sea Otter, and Zombie (which isn't a joke, it refers to a particular form of cyber-crime, of which I wasn't previously, er, aware.)

Perhaps there should be an "Awareness Week Fatigue" awareness week.  Dementia has a lot of competition.

It doesn't figure in the early hits, although if you're in the trade, so to speak, our Awareness Week, in July, feels like quite a big deal.  Certainly I was heavily involved in Fantastic Fred's planning team, and recruited my sister in law to produce the publicity for us.  We had a full programme of events, an information stall, a showing of "Iris", a specially commissioned piece of drama, a recreation of "Partial Recall"  at the carers' information centre .... my own contribution was to organise a special singing session involving children from a primary school next to the day centre where I regularly do my thing.

I daresay we raised some awareness, how much is hard to quantify.  The Week had a very different feel to me now that dementia is something that involves me personally.  Some of the comments we picked up reminded me, which must be obvious to anyone who doesn't live and breathe the subject, of the extent of the stigma that still attaches to it.  The condition is still seen by many as something shameful, a stain on the family to which the sufferer belongs, much in the way that cancer used to be.  If we are now able to talk more freely about cancer, saying "tumour" when we mean tumour, rather than "growth" or "lump", that's all to the good but maybe reflects the advances in medicine whereby cancer is no longer an automatic death sentence.  People survive it as they never used to; with some forms they are even likely to survive it.   But no-one recovers from dementia.  It's an early warning of the inevitable and what's more it robs victims of their dignity and ability to fight it.   You can hardly blame people for taking the "ignorance is bliss" attitude.

I was also reminded of the difference between savoir and connaitre.  I prepared a rolling Powerpoint to run in the background at the carers' centre.  I researched it thoroughly and it has been widely appreciated, so I "know" my stuff.  A year ago, however, I knew it only in the savoir sense: I was well informed.  This year it was connaitre, I know it through having encountered it personally as a carer, and my own slides hit me with a poignancy they did not have before even though they convery the same information. I look at them now and think: that's my dad they're talking about.  Real connaitre would be knowing that you have the condition yourself, but here's the perpetual irony: the more you have it, the less you know you do.