ABSTRACT
The definition of dementia is ‘a madness marked by failure or loss of mental powers, feeble-mindedness’;2 in fact another word for schizophrenia is ‘dementia praecox’. Dementia is also a malady often associated with the elderly: ‘senile dementia’. Formerly people over 65 with the associated symptoms were diagnosed as suffering from senile dementia and those below that age said to be suffering from pre-senile dementia. Senility has always referred to the dementia of old age. For young Alzheimer’s sufferers, then, this label may be an embarrassing one to wear, a tag commonly associated with being old and being insane, none of which was an accurate description of the client group I was working with.
