The Impact of Dementia on Communication



The Impact of Dementia on Communication

Introduction

As people progress through dementia, they become more and more compromised in their ability to carry out basic and instrumental activities of daily living. As their abilities decrease, they become less able to process and interpret environmental stimuli (including screening out irrelevant and attending to salient stimuli) and formulate an action plan that leads to successful task completion (Allen, Earhart & Blue 2002).

Generally, communication is action, the act of communicating, and establishing relationship to others by any means. In humans, it is a driving psychosocial to transmit information through the use of language, gestures, attitudes and gestures. Thus, the frustrations of being unable to complete a requested or desired task can lead to behaviours that further interfere with the ability to complete the task, create a risk for safety, and disturb others who share the environment with the individual. The inability to accurately interpret environmental stimuli can also lead to behaviours that interfere with task completion, safety, or disturb others.

When a person develops dementia, brain cells are destroyed and those complex pathways become interrupted. As a result, communication skills become impaired and problems arise. These changes in communication are frustrating to both you and the person with dementia. But, always remember that it's the disease of dementia, not the person, causing these changes in communication (www.alzheimers.org.au).

Aim and Objective

The aim of this assignment is to focus on the present area which shows the effect of dementia on the ability of the person with dementia in communicating with others.

Discussion and Analysis

People suffering from dementia often cannot explain what they want. This causes those frustrations, anger and even aggression. But, fortunately, there are ways to facilitate communication with the patient. First of all, check with your doctor, it is not caused by the behavior of taking drugs or other disease.

Symptoms

The fact that a person has problems with speech, indicate the following features:

Frequent repetition of the same words

The use of profanity

Violation of the logical order of words

Loss of thought

Attempts to communicate with gestures

The use of the distorted words to describe the object

It is a fact that the disease process in dementia results in the progressive destruction of brain tissue, area in the brain which are responsible for sending, interpreting and receiving communication messages are progressively affected. More importantly, the destruction of the brain tissue progress, it lead to become very difficult for that person having dementia to communicate well, therefore greater efforts are needs for the health care practitioners in order to promote the optimal channels for communication.

Dementia-Related Issues

Dementia patients become more and more compromised in their ability to carry out basic activities of daily living. Thus, people with dementia in general better express or reflect what they felt and smelled, but what they have seen and heard. After a belligerent appearance, patients with dementia disease can hide a lot of fear, disappointment and offenses, as would happen to us if we were frustrated in our attempts to do something ...