Dementia

Dementia (taken from Latin, originally meaning "madness", from de- "without" + ment, the root of mens "mind") is a serious loss of cognitive ability in a previously unimpaired person, beyond what might be expected from normal aging.
Dementia is a declineis a decline ofreasoning,memory, and other mental abilities (the cognitive functions).
This decline eventually impairs the ability to carry out everyday activitiessuch asdriving; household chores; and even personal caresuch asbathing, dressing, and feeding (often called activities of daily living, or ADLs).
It may be static, the result of a unique global brain injury, or progressive, resulting in long-term decline due to damage or disease in the body.
Although dementia is far more common in the geriatric population, it may occur in any stage of adulthood.

Dementia, unlike Alzheimer's, is not a disease in itself. When dementia appears the higher mental functions of the patient are involved initially.
Eventually, in the later stages, the person may not know what day of the week, month or year it is, he may not know where he is, and might not be able to identify the people around him.

Symptoms
- Memory loss - the patient may forget his way back home from the shops. He may forget names and places. He may find it hard to remember what happened earlier on during the day.
- Moodiness - the patient may become more and more moody as parts of the brain that control emotion become damaged. Moods may also be affected by fear and anxiety - the patient is frightened about what is happening to him.
- Communicative difficulties
- The affected person finds it harder to talk read and/or write.

Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a chronic, severe, and disabling mental illness and also sometimes called split personality disorder.
It affects men and women with equal frequency but in women it begins later. For this reason, males tend to account for more than half of patients in services with high numbers of young adults. Although schizophrenia usually begins in young adulthood, there are cases in which the disorder begins later (over 45 years).
Schizophrenia is thought to affect about 1% of people worldwide.

There are 5 types of schizophrenia:
- Catatonic
- Disorganized
- Paranoid
- Residual
- Undifferentiated

Symptoms, Schizophrenia may have a variety of symptoms. Usually the illness develops slowly over months or even years.
At first, the symptoms may not be noticeable. As the illness continues, psychotic symptoms develop:
- Delusions, false personal beliefs held with conviction in spite of reason or evidence to the contrary, not explained bythat person's cultural context
- Hallucinations,perceptions (can besound, sight, touch, smell, or taste) that occur in the absence of an actual external stimulus(Auditory hallucinations, those of voice or other sounds,are the most common type of hallucinationsin schizophrenia.)
- Disorganized thoughts and behaviors
- Disorganized speech
- Catatonic behavior, in which the affected person's body may be rigid and the person may be unresponsive

Schizophrenia usually begins before the age of 45, symptoms last for 6 months or more, and people start to lose their ability to socialize and work. Genetic factors appear to play a role. People who have family members with schizophrenia may be more likely to get the disease themselves.