Dementia or Depression

Mav2126

One of the things I have noticed with my aging mother is that she has symptoms that are similar to depression. We got her on an antidepressant and some of the depression symptoms have gone away thankfully. My question is how do you tell the difference if something is dementia related or an acutal mental illness. Its a trick thing to differentiate and therefore treat accordingly.

H1235

We took my mom to the PCP and they did the little 2 minute test. She did fine on the test. I insisted something was wrong and they sent her to a neurologist. The testing there took hours. Not only did she have dementia, but the doctor recommended she stop driving and said she was not safe to live alone. Dementia is about way more than memory loss. Problems I noticed were, confusion, inability to understand her physical limits, grumpy and argumentative, very poor decisions, inability to plan, depression and couldn’t manage priorities(executive functioning). Notice I didn’t even mention memory loss, it was just not a huge issue. I would make a note of all the things you are seeing that concern you and send a note to her doctor. I have attached a staging tool. Maybe you could use this a a guide for what to look for. I hope something here is helpful.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6372d16ea4e02c7ce64425b7/t/63f7b80d80d8aa3e3aa4a47d/1677178894184/DBAT.pdf