Why Dementia? its just a name

During the past 20 years we have moved a long way since the days of labelling, or have we?

In psychiatry we rarely use the term schizophrenia, previously known as Precox Dementia, instead we describe the individual has having a personality disorder coupled with delusional ideas and some form of hallucinations. What happened to the Manic Depressive? Oh yes it was renamed Bi-Polar disorder. I understand that the labelling theory introduced us to putting people into little boxes and indicated that the illness was at the forefront of psychiatric care and not the person and that the needs of the institution, the Psychiatrist, the Nurse and the care plan came first. Obviously now everything is person-centered and the needs of the individual are prioritised. We have learned that everyone’s illness is unique to them because of their background, culture, faith and overall Social Psychology. We even dropped Senile from Senile Dementia, which left us with plain old dementia.

 

We have come a long way since the work houses and the lunatic asylums, where the residents of such institutions were either Demented, Possessed with demons, or just plain old lunatics. It did not get much better as we entered the 20^th century, for years we referred to those suffering from mental illness as mental defectives. For years we believed that drilling a hole in the frontal lobe or temporal lobe was the cure for lunacy, ECT for many years, right up to the end of the 20^th century became the preferred method of treatment.

 

Dementia, what does it mean? What does it say, what is it?

I was once asked;

 “Paul, what is the difference between dementia and Alzheimer’s disease?”

 without being flippant I said

“It’s the same as the difference between a BMW and a car!”

I felt awful to be honest but it was the first thing that came to mind to describe the answer.

Let me explain. Dementia is a latin word which means poor mental health, so going back to Senile dementia, we dropped the wrong word if we needed to indicate that it was to be referred to the elderly, Senile meaning old in latin. So breaking the word down (De meaning against or poor/bad and Mentia meaning the mind, the brain) simply means mental illness or of poor mental health.

Why do we use the term dementia for most of the time when dealing with old age psychiatry.

The truth is, dementia covers; anxiety, depression, stress, personality disorders, bi-polar, vascular (dementia)mental illness, usually caused by a stroke, Alzheimer’s Disease (shrinking of the brain in the first instance), Lewy Body, Korsakoff’s Syndrome, CJD, Frontal/Temporal lobe (dementia) mental illness, caused by trauma to the head, in fact any illness of the mind is a dementia or as we commonly know it by, Mental illness.

 

To summarise then; we should either continue to use the archaic term of dementia to describe all forms of mind related illnesses or we just drop the archaic term, which isn’t even belonging to a live language anymore, and use the more user-friendly term mental illness.