Reminiscence Therapy and 'Remembering Some Guys'

#WeblogPoMo Post 2

Read this article at Defector the other day and came away completely blown away by the whole idea of "reminiscence therapy."

There’s light-centered therapy or music therapy [. . .] art therapy, which becomes ideal for some patients who might become more reluctant to talk as the disease progresses [. . .] But there’s also something called reminiscence therapy. The idea is that by recalling past events, usually those associated with happy times, dementia patients can be more cheerful and sociable. The phrase used a lot is “come out of their shells.”

Turns out, some enterprising folks associated with the Society for a American Baseball Research (SABR) are leveraging this tool to help dementia patients through the kinds of conversations that pretty much any baseball fan enjoys: 'remembering some guys'1.

The idea and the events have become so popular that they've now got a formal partnership with the Alzheimer's Association. There's even a site set up with resources to help start chapters in your area (https://sabrbaseballmemories.org/). Pretty cool stuff.

  1. Which is what about 95% of my contemporary conversations with my old high school friends consist of these days. ↩︎