Football memories flood back and help unlock minds
This week is World Alzheimer’s Day, where organisations around the world raise awareness about Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.
And a unique organisation is using Scotland’s national sport to help unlock the memories of people suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s.
Run in conjunction with Alzheimer Scotland, the Football Memories project sees individuals open doors which have been closed for months, years even, suddenly open again with the help of legends whose influence stretches back decades.
For five years 69- year- old former headteacher Michael White has been leading the Football Memories project.
With more than 90,000 people in Scotland living with dementia and countless thousands more undiagnosed, the trauma of dealing with an illness whose cause and cure are unknown can tear families apart.
Through football, though, White’s work with a team of 80 volunteers and now 120 groups nationwide – backed by the national football museum at Hampden – is evoking responses from the unresponsive and triggering banter to replace the torment. The project was launched two years ago and trains volunteers to spend time with people with dementia who have an interest in football, talking about teams and matches from the past and working with images and memorabilia to stimulate memories.
“It is just a bunch of guys sitting around talking about football,” said Michael White.
“But that’s exactly what makes it special.”
The part the game played in lives of men in the Scotland of the 1940s, 50s and 60s transcended age and class and was at the heart of community life.
With no TV coverage or social media, the game was simply embedded in their minds – and with the right prompting, it comes flooding back. Despite the incredible work, though, they are looking for more funding, more research and more answers.
Michael added: “There have been two bits of research done, both of which concluded what we were doing was a good thing – but that it needed more research.
“We’d like to sit down with medical people.
“I’d like to know what it is about sport that was so fundamentally important in their lives that they would maybe forget their own family members before they would forget the centre- forward of their football team and the goals they scored.”
White’s own revelatory work extends back to 2004 when, as a historian in Falkirk who specialised in his passion for the local club, he spoke to a group of dementia sufferers at a day centre.
“I knew a little about the disease but not a lot,” he said.
“And it became pretty obvious that their recent memories had gone – they couldn’t tell you what they had had for breakfast or how they got there.
“But when I showed them old pictures of teams from the likes of 1936 and 1940, out of 11, most of them were getting at least eight or nine names.
“They were describing where they were standing at Brockville and how goals were scored.”
Read more about the project and how to get friends and family involved or become a volunteer at www.footballmemories.org.uk