Key Question Flashcards
Q.
Can our understanding of psychology help with our understanding and the care of Dementia patients?
Stats
Effects 850,000 people in the UK in 2015 (estimated rise to 1,000,000 by 2025…doubling again by 2050)
What is dementia?
A progressive problem with processing information including memory. Dementia causes a decline in a person’s ability to think, understand, and remember and affects a person’s function.
Older people usually will process information slower than younger people but Dementia is an extreme medical case of this.
Progression
Varies in severity from slight to severe over time: Forgetfulness, Trouble multi-tasking, Fluctuating disorientation, Diminished insight, Learning new things becomes difficult, Severe disorientation to time and place, No short term memory, Loss of speech
MSM
Short Term Memory is affected by dementia
A lot of the ‘forgetting’ seen in dementia is because the information has never been encoded into STM (they cannot pay attention to pass it into STM)
WMM
They have a declining Central Executive which means that they have difficulty paying attention/shifting attention
RM
If a person with dementia is saying confusing and mixed up things it might be because their Schemas are muddled i.e. they may confuse their adult children with their own brothers and sisters because they fill the gap in their mind with someone familiar.
E&S
Episodic Memory decreases over time whereas Semantic remains fairly stable (Nyberg, 2003)
The fading of Episodic memory starts in the ‘present’ and then spreads throughout the past.
This is why those with dementia can remember information from a long time ago
Help
Give reminders in form of notes
Give them one task to do at a time
Don’t have too many people talking to them at once
Give them cues to correct their schemas
Usually go with what they say and don’t correct them
“validation therapy” (they are stuck in time)
