Graphic medicine as relational practice in dementia care: Comics, affect and immediacy

Relational practice is woven through most nursing curriculums but finding engaging and innovative ways to integrate it into courses is challenging. Our project uses visual art to integrate relational practice into nursing education. Pedagogies like relational inquiry emphasize contextual learning and the uniqueness of individual lived experiences (Hartrick, Doane & Varcoe, 2015). Narrative is a relational methodology that shares emotions and experiences with learners, but prose narratives can be just more text in a pile of text, unable to distinguish themselves from other, more technical, course readings. Visual art, meanwhile, offers immediacy and identification and so can better provide context and emotional layers to peoples’ experiences. For several years now, practitioners and patients have been exploring graphic medicine, the use of comics to support a relational perspective (Williams, n.d.). Our project explores the narratives of professional care givers in their experience of people with dementia, often their own family members. These narratives are being transformed into a comic resource for students who will one day be caring for people with dementia. The comic, I Know How This Ends , is based on the literary form of classical tragedy with its emphasis on inevitability and caregiver stratagems to forestall it. Comics have allowed us the ability to explore emotions like frustration, resentment, and hopelessness in a way that words alone could not. They have also helped us highlight the relational dynamics between people with dementia, their family members and their care givers, specifically around control and power (or loss of control and power). Our talk will argue the efficacy of comics art as a pedagogical strategy for improving relational practice.

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