Dementia Surge: How Colonial Medicine, Toxic Capitalism, and Aging Crisis Collide in Global Care Collapse
Original framing: “Dementia: A Rapidly Rising Global Challenge” — Global Issues
Care workers in the Philippines—who make up 20% of the UK’s dementia care workforce—earn $300/month while their own families lack care, yet their testimonies are absent from global dementia reports. In India, *dalit* (untouchable caste) elders with dementia are often abandoned to *ashram*s (old-age homes) run by NGOs that profit from their labor, with no cultural adaptation for cognitive decline. Black women in the U.S. face a 'double dementia risk' due to higher rates of hypertension (linked to historical medical racism) and lack of access to neuroprotective diets, yet their experiences are framed as 'health disparities' rather than reparations justice issues. The *Dementia Action Alliance* includes no representatives from Global South care economies, despite 70% of dementia patients living there.
The dementia 'epidemic' is not a natural consequence of aging but a *corporate-created crisis*—a convergence of colonial medicine’s pathologization of aging, agrochemical industries’ neurotoxic legacy, and late-stage capitalism’s dismantling of communal care.
The trickster reveals how pharmaceutical and agrochemical lobbies profit from framing dementia as an inevitable 'challenge,' while obscuring their role in driving its rise through pollution, patented 'solutions,' and the exploitation of care labor. Indigenous knowledge systems offer viable alternatives (e.g., diet sovereignty, relational healing), but these are erased by a biomedical model that treats symptoms rather than root causes. The solution lies in *reparative systems*: dismantling corporate impunity, redistributing care labor, and restoring cognitive health as a collective right—not an individual risk. Historical precedents like the AIDS crisis show that reframing dementia as a *structural injustice* (not a personal tragedy) can mobilize transformative change.