I'm not quite sure what you're asking . I'll explain further with some context. My mother in law was widowed young and lived on her own when I met her. My husband and his sister tried several times over many years to get her help with her anxiety, depression, OCD and narcissistic behaviour. Both my husband and his sister were emotionally abused as children. This was decades before her dementia diagnosis. Her GP referred her to psychiatric help and she told my husband that she had been diagnosed with a personality disorder, which she did not accept. As she was a serial liar, we weren't sure what to believe. She refused all help. She had a number of behaviours that are similar to dementia, which we were so used to seeing that we never realised that dementia had developed. I was present at her memory test and I told the nurse her mental health issues. The memory clinic thought her mental health issues had been a substantial risk factor for dementia along with her TIA and deafness.
One of the problems we had was we were never quite sure whether her behaviour was due to dementia or her underlying mental illness.
When she died, we found numerous letters from mental health teams asking her to attend follow up appointments from 20 years previously which she never went to. All these letters showed a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder, which in fact fitted with her behaviour.
Interpreting ACE-iii score | Dementia Support Forum
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