Secondary Mental Disorders: Dementia and Delirium - Dissertation Example

Secondary Mental Disorders: Dementia and DeliriumDementia is a neurodegenerative disorder that comes with old age. The symptoms of the disease include loss of memory either long term or short term and poor concentration. Moreover, the patient may experience problems with language, and self-organization is deranged, inability to tell the purpose of objects or to recognize them and personality and inhibition. While dementia is quite chronic, delirium is acute with each of them having different causes and risk factors coupled to them.

There are quite a myriad of mental disorders that mimic dementia and delirium; they have slight difference with additional symptoms, consequently, becoming problematic in determining the exact condition the client is suffering from. Psychiatric depression is key among the mental disorders that are similar in a large percentage in manifestation with dementia (Butcher, Mineka & Hoooley, 2014).Loss of memory is the most common behaviours of the individuals that are easily confused with depression and dementia.

In both conditions, there is a tremendous loss of memory that might include both the long-term and short-term memory. Without proper evaluation and assessment of the memory status of the client, the diagnosis might easily be missed. Memory loss to the depressed patient expresses itself differently from those of dementia or delirium. Memory tests on the depressed patient show poor cooperation while those of dementia are characterized by inability to learn new information. Attention deficit is experienced in both conditions.

In both conditions, the patients are not able to concentrate and sustain conversations. Moreover, distraction is not the only cause of poor concentration in both cases. The patients lose concentration even in a well secured and enclosed environment. Therefore the two most common cognitive malfunctions are found in both diseases. Therefore, there is need to do a thorough differential diagnosis before settling on a particular diagnosis. ReferenceButcher, J. N., Mineka, S.

, & Hooley, J. M. (2014). Abnormal psychology (16th ed.). Boston: Pearson/Allyn and Bacon.