Art and Alzheimer's: Aged Find Focus In Self-Expression

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 13, 1994.

By ELLEN GRAHAM

BALTIMORE- For the past year, Anne Watts and a dozen other artists have been "taking art to places where it doesn't usually get to go' and, she says, “finding art where It doesn't usually get found." Specifically, nursing homes where people with Alzheimer's disease live. * Ms. Watts, a 31-year-old composer and singer in a rock-and-roll band, figured that artists wrestling creative demons might share a common bond with lonely people struggling to communicate at life's end.

When Ms. Watts proposed the project to Meridian Healthcare Inc., a corporate provider of long-term care, she envisioned something quite different from conventional art therapy, where groups typically are led througth a task such as coloring. Instead, instructors would be professionals working one-on-one with residents.

Meridian was already trying an approach that dovetailed with Ms. Watts's plan. Meridian, a division of Genesis Health Ventures Inc., has established special units at eight of its facilities, mainly in the Baltimore area, where demented residents are given 40 hours a week of structured activity. In these special care” units, just 3% of the residents require physchoactive drugs to manage their behaviour, compared with between 40%and 60% of Meridians other residents ...

... Sherwin Mark, a Jewish artist from South Africa, found himself paired with a German Woman who had lived in Berlin during World War II.

Ms. Watts is impressed with the give and take. Nursing-home-art "has got this random, selfless freedom that I've seen artists strive their whole lives to achieve,” she says. Thus, in some ways, the elderly became the artists' mentors.

BEIT PROTEA RETIREMENT HOME

Herzlia, Israel