In performing their clinical duties, American psychiatrists are trained to use a specific
	classification system known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (aka,
	the DSM).   According to the most recent editions of this manaul, the defining feature of
	dementia is the impairment of memory.
	It is important to appreciate the fact that other specialists in medicine approach this topic more
	methodically.  To neurologists, for example, dementia is not a disease, per se.  Rather, the
	term dementia refers to a syndrome of signs and symptoms – such as deficits in thinking,
	perceiving, feeling, moving, speaking, writing, or planning – which are caused either by toxins,
	by disease processes outside the brain (e.g., diabetes, hypothyroidism, cancer), or by
	degenerative conditions which originate in the central nervous system (e.g., Parkinson’s
	disease, Pick’s disease, Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, multiple sclerosis).
	Key Points:
	Dementia is arguably under-recognized by psychiatrists in the United States for at least
	three reasons:  1) due to the inordinate emphasis which the DSM has placed upon the loss of
	memory; 2) due to a sociocultural expectation that dementia should appear only in old age;
	and 3) due to the tendency of physicians to attribute dementia-symptoms in psychiatric
	patients to mental illness, rather than to toxins or somatic (bodily) disease.