To illustrate this point, this paper identifies seven specific ways that the zombie metaphor is referenced in both the scholarly and popular literature on AD.
Although the blame for negative perceptions of people with AD has been placed on the biomedical understanding of dementia, I argue that strong negative emotional responses to AD are also buttressed by the social construction of people with AD as zombies. I argue here that the AD stigma is of a specific sort – it is dehumanisation based on disgust and terror. In the literature on Alzheimer's disease (AD), scholars have noted how both the disease and the people who are diagnosed as having it have been stigmatised.
