The struggle of apathy in dementia

Abstract

Most people will recognise a sense of apathy within them, at some point during their lives, and this may present to a greater or lesser extent depending on the individual and the context. When people are asked about what apathy is, what it means, or how it might feel, generally they can provide an insight, suggesting it is something broadly universal to the human experience. We might consider apathy to be a lack of motivation, a feeling of not being bothered, or a desire to do something coupled completely with a desire not to do that same thing. For most people though, apathy can be overcome, and it represents a fleeting problem that does not impact on day-to-day life. For people with dementia, apathy is an important problem because it is recognised anecdotally, clinically and in research to be common (Selbaek et al., 2013; Zhao et al., 2016), persistent (van der Linde et al., 2017), and difficult to live with for both the person with dementia and those close to them (Feast et al., 2016). Follow-up studies suggest that apathy is associated with worse health and social outcomes (Breitve et al., 2018).