Facts, phenomenology, and psychoanalytic contributions to dementia care

The risk of developing dementia grows with age, rising to a one in five chance over the age of 80. Vascular dementia is the consequence of strokes and insufficient blood supply to the brain. Fronto-temporal dementia covers a range of conditions, associated with diverse symptoms, which may include impairments in semantic memory, and the earliest changes are often felt in the area of personality and behaviour. The difficulty in thinking about the experience of the person with dementia may reflect an understandable tendency to "turn a blind eye" to such frightening and disturbing states of loss and diminution of functioning. Disturbing states of mind, and unconscious fears or anxieties, will be experienced by individuals with dementia both early on in the illness, when fears may be more easily put into words, and also later, when communication may be operating at predominantly a nonverbal level.