Personhood, What is it?

A small article on facebook might give us a clue.

Centre for Research on Personhood in Dementia

Understanding personhood – still sliding on murky terrain?

I was recently at a workshop where notions of personhood, legal capacity, moral status, and mental capacity were all being debated. It occurs to me that we really have yet to develop a definition of personhood that is meaningful and useable. Is there a tendency to limit understanding of personhood to only a legal context?

Within this context, we seem to get caught up into arguments about issues such as whether or not one requires memory and consciousness in order to have ‘personhood’. Kitwood’s work challenges this lens, and his definition of personhood as a status or standing that is bestowed upon someone within the context of one’s relationships is often cited. This definition moves the focus away from cognition but it still seems inadequate in capturing the essence of personhood.

Certainly, this is an issue with which our research team has grappled. In the current era of ‘evidence-based practice’ the need to be able to recognize and measure ‘personhood’ has clear appeal: how will we know if we’ve gotten there if we don’t know where ‘there’ is? However, the alternative argument can also be made – is the process of looking for personhood more important than finding it? Are we trying to define something that is so elusive that it defies definition and operationalization?

Deborah O'Connor