Vol.:(0123456789) Journal of Medical Humanities https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-023-09840-y 1 3 ORIGINAL SCHOLARLY ARTICLE “Inside Out of Mind”: Alternative Realities, Dementia and Graphic Medicine Laboni Das 1  · Sathyaraj Venkatesan 1 Accepted: 19 December 2023 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2024 Abstract Graphic medicine, an interdisciplinary feld situated at the crossroads of comics and healthcare, operates as a medium through which the intricate nature of experiences with illness can be artic- ulated, challenging orthodox medical dogmatism in an engaging and accessible way. Combining the afordances of comics and the narrative power of storytelling, graphic medicine elucidates the socio-cultural stigmatization of dementia infuenced by a multitude of discourses. Diverging from existing discourses that depict individuals with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) as zombies, brain-dead, or empty shells, graphic memoirs reconstruct these reductive notions and represent them as imagi- native, productive, and perceptive. Taking these cues, the present paper close reads some sections of Dana Walrath’s (2016) Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass in order to dem- onstrate how graphic medicine reconceptualizes the preeminent hallucinatory experiences of her AD-aficted mother, Alice, as visions. Walrath deploys collage art to epitomize Alice’s ordeal with AD. In particular, Walrath deploys thought-provoking fragments from Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Won- derland, strategically to proximate Alice’s experiences with AD and tackle the problem of dementia and sociality. Additionally, the paper explores how the text fosters interdependence, respect, and trust to recognize and restore Alice’s personhood. The paper concludes by discussing how Alice- heimer’s operates as an alternative paradigm beyond the confnes of biomedical and cultural mod- els of dementia through the use of lexical puissance. Keywords Dementia · Hallucination · Alternate reality · graphic medicine · Aliceheimer’s Good memory is not only about healthy cognitive capacity but also about how forget- ting is crucial to both the sciences and the arts of life in the aging process. —Stephen Katz, “Embodied Memory: Ageing, Neuroculture, and the Genealogy of Mind” There is a loss with dementia, but what matters is how we approach our losses and our gains. Reframing dementia as a diferent way of being, as a window into another * Laboni Das laboni.das73@gmail.com 1 Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, India