Interaction: speech therapist – patient with a moderate stage of Alzheimer’s disease

This article discusses the problems of interaction (defined as a basic unit of social communication – Domagała 2015b) in the conditions of a moderate stage of dementia. The attention has been focused on problems with keeping interpersonal relations adequate in the examination situation in respect of social skills. The study was conducted on the empirical material gathered under the research project “Narrative and Its Disorders in Alzheimer’s Dementia. The Scale of Narrative Skills in Alzheimer’s Dementia” (project manager: Dr Aneta Domagała; 39th Ministry of Science and Higher Education competition of research projects). A total of 60 patients with a moderate stage of Alzheimer’s dementia were studied. In the studied population, about 58% of subjects were able to function correctly in contact with the interlocutor. It should be noted that there were persons (ca. 17%) who were able to form a (strongly) positively marked relationship, and were characterized by high skills of cooperation with another person in a diagnostic situation. About 42% of the subjects showed difficulties in the relationship with the interlocutor. The evaluation of basic dimensions of interaction occurring in the examination condition is fundamental to determining the linguistic abilities of a patient with dementia; the subject’s utterances, analyzed and interpreted by a speech therapist, are situationally conditioned (here: according to how the patient perceives a given communication situation).