Leisure and everyday life with dementia

This book examines leisure in the everyday lives of people living with dementia. It challenges readers to consider the role of leisure activities beyond their potential for therapeutic benefit. Leisure encompasses a range of activities: the things we do, and those that interest and engage us given opportunity and choice. Authors contributing chapters emphasise how leisure offers people living with dementia opportunity to realise their citizenship, through participating in leisure in everyday life. They explore the role of society in enabling this through giving equal chances to make choices about how, when and where people participate. This is the first time that an edited collection has been brought together to examine this topic. The book’s co-editors include Jane Twigg, who is herself living with dementia: Jane’s vision of leisure as life-enhancing and open to all people living with dementia as a right has guided its creation.

Contributors from multiple disciplines discuss areas including sports, arts and culture, travel, nature, and the online world. Chapters unpick the diverse implications for care and provision of dementia and leisure services, for research, and for society more generally. They present frameworks for understanding leisure opportunities in research and recommendations for implementing them in practice. The content should be considered essential reading for anyone whose study or work in nursing or social care, occupational therapy, social work, arts therapies, arts, health and wellbeing, sports and exercise, or gerontology includes an interest in dementia.