Segregation and incarceration of people living with dementia in care homes

People living with dementia experience individual and structural harms in care homes. This chapter introduces lived experiences, critical disability studies scholarship and disability human rights as vital resources in understanding and challenging injustices associated with people living with dementia in care homes. The chapter begins by presenting the lived experiences of people living with dementia of incarceration and segregation as well as their acts of everyday and organised resistance to these circumstances. It then draws on analytical tools from critical disability studies that support an alternative way of understanding care homes in terms of dehumanisation, segregation and incarceration. Next, the chapter explores human rights, specifically the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), as providing transformative tools to address the segregation and incarceration in care homes, and offers supported decision-making and deinstitutionalisation as two key strategies for change.