Historical changes in the subjective experience of Alzheimer's disease: The role of anxiety

Abstract

Various obstacles impede the historical study of the patients' subjective experience of dementia, in particular the lack of testimony from the patients themselves and their families. The best historical sources for assessing the subjectivity of patients with dementia is probably doctors' accounts of the psychological symptoms of their patients. In evaluating a body of such accounts, chosen in a representative manner from the medical literature in the years after 1870, this paper suggests that an increase in levels of anxiety is the main change that dementia-Alzheimer's patients seem to have experienced historically. This rise in anxiety about the illness may be dated back several decades. Among the causes for such increased anxiety might be a greater tendency to institutionalize Alzheimer patients, and a higher societal valuation placed upon intellectual performance.