Dementia is not a specific disease. It's an overall term that describes a group of symptoms associated with a decline in memory or other thinking skills severe enough to reduce a person's ability to perform everyday activities. Alzheimer's disease accounts for 60 to 80 percent of cases.
Not a specific disease, dementia is a group of conditions characterized by impairment of at least two brain functions, such as memory loss and judgment. Symptoms include forgetfulness, limited social skills, and thinking abilities so impaired that it interferes with daily functioning.
Suspicion or delusion may occur in people with Alzheimer's disease. Delusions is firmly held beliefs in things that are not real. A delusion is not the same thing as a hallucination. While delusions involve false beliefs, hallucinations are false perceptions of objects or events that are sensory in nature. Suspicion springs from delusions accusing others of theft, infidelity or other improper behavior.
When my mother grew old, dementia began to grip her mind. I could see and understand the cause of some of her symptoms in the area of suspicion, delusion and hallucinations. So I thought it might be worth discussing.
To begin with I have another anomaly in addition to being an Aspie. I have a severe form of color blindness, protanomaly, a type of red-green color blindness where the red cones in the eye do not detect enough red light, but instead respond more to green light. Long before there were LED televisions there were cathode ray tube technology. The cathode ray tube (CRT) is a vacuum tube that contains one or more electron guns and a phosphorescent screen, and is used to display images. A color image is produced by 3 guns (primary colors: red, green, blue) at the end of the tube. Controlling the intensity of each of the three electron beams produced by the guns, add to produce the spectrum of the rainbow. So in a sense I only have two working color guns. But I see colors but they are just not the same colors that everyone else sees. You see my mind makes up the third color.
As my mother aged, she also lost access to many of her senses. Her eyesight was failing dramatically and so was her hearing. But her mind was still active. It just filled in the missing parts that she could not see or hear. So when I visited her she would tell me about the large spiders that were crawling in her room and she was terrified. She said look, they are on the door. I would walk over to the door and there was nothing there, just maybe a shadow on the door. I would say, "Look mom, there are no spiders here". But she would see them because she was almost blind and that is what her mind would see. She would pick up a word or two in a conversation and her mind would fabricate the rest of the conversation. Sometimes she would hear the word wrong. And this really developed into strange hallucinations. For example, when she was in the nursing home, she called me on the telephone and said that the woman in the next bed had died during the night and the nursing home was trying to keep it all hush, hush. Well I visited her later that day and low and behold the woman in the next bed was very much alive. I would say to my mom, "Look she is not dead but very much alive." And she would respond back, "No she is dead". I would pull back the separating curtain and show her the woman in the next bed who was sitting up playing a card game of solitaire. So the thing that I could see is that the mind keeps working even when the senses begin to fail. And it is natural for the mind to fabricate the missing pieces and try to make some sense out of life.
30 Aug 2018, 10:01 am
