What stage of Dementia is confabulation?

[TomatoPotato]

DM is is fantasising. Her latest one is that her best friend (in her 80s) lives in the care home with her and has remarried one of the residents. Who is also married to one of the senior carers. I asked her how the carer felt about that and she supposed the carer would have to “share” him. No point even discussing bigamy laws, this is all fabrication. Apparently all our family “live upstairs”.

DM still recognises people and has quite a good short term memory, but it’s the fabrication of life that is taking over her mind. I read that this behaviour is called “confabulation” and is typical in stage 4/5 of dementia.

Has anyone else had any experience of this and did your DP ever improve or is this really the start of the end?

TIA

I'm so sorry. That must be utterly shit for you

Hi yes we had this I didn't know it had a name. I wish I'd have been on mumsnet when my mum started with this. She'd have been about 88 then living alone.
One day she rang me really upset as she'd been for a walk, a man had stopped in a car and flashed her ! I was absolutely livid called the police, they came and took a statement.

It wasn't until a few months later when she said someone was ringing her doorbell at all times of the day and night that we became suspicious. Then a couple of months later she said one of her neighbours had flashed her.
She was pretty normal though most of the time. But then went downhill quite quickly aged 92. She ended up in a care home where she died 6 months later.

@TomatoPotato there is a difference between confabulation and delusions/ confusion, some of the posters above are posting examples of the latter. Confabulation tends to occur where there are memory gaps and are based on reality ( it’s a bit like filling in the missing gaps )and can happen in healthy people as well as people who have memory disorders or psychiatric illness, so it’s not a specific sign of approaching end of life. So someone saying “ I went there” in response to a program on the telly that has triggered a memory of somewhere they had been ,could be a confabulation , whereas thinking the staff are aliens could be a delusion. Sometimes people are just making a narrative that fits the reality of their experience, as a persons eyesight and hearing diminish,everyday occurrences can become perplexing and concerning . It might actually be nice to believe your best friend is in the same home as you, sometimes you get elderly people coupling up in nhomes because they think they are each others spouses ( which can be distressing for family) It’s not necessarily anything to worry about but , as others have said, people with dementia showing increased confusion may need a check over to exclude infection, dehydration, constipation etc

My grandma was a fantasist.
Told everyone that her name was Belinda.
She had been married 8 times.
Appeared on stage with the Queen.
All the carers were her children and kept telling them off.
My mum was her below stairs cleaner.
My aunt was the scullery maid.

Unfortunately she didn't know who the rest of her family were.
Such a sad end to a long life.

Mum was confabulation as described by MySereneBird. My parents went on a lot of cruises and travelled wildly but mum ended up confusing the programme she had watched the day before with her holiday memories.
I once saw confabulation described as the subconscious filling in the missing bits of memory with something that seems to fit. So mum remembered the penguins from Blue Planet 2 but couldn't remember where from so her subconscious filled in a cruise. Similarly if you ask her what she had for lunch she will nearly always say a cheese sandwich even if the remains of her not cheese sandwich lunch are still in the kitchen because it's something you might have for lunch.

I usually avoid threads like this because I'm devastated about what is happening to my Mum and how she treated my Dad during the last year of his life..He was already very very poorly..

She told everyone that he was abusing her in the worst possible way.. escaping to the neighbours crying about what he'd done...

No way did he do any of it..

So so sad and what eventually caused us to make the decision about a care home..

And unfortunately we couldn't always just 'go along with it' and had to gently tell Mum that Dad wouldn't/didn't do that...as they were always together and how can you agree with it when your poor father is distraught and sitting in the same room!
She was very distressed that we 'didn't believe her'.
Awful awful time..

Dad is dead now and Mum still has 'fascinating' stories about the 'abuse' she suffers from staff and residents and even visitors..but it's getting less and less and she's getting less and less distressed...

Sorry.. I really wish I had a better answer for you..

Hopefully she will never get as bad as my Mum..

Sending love to everyone on this thread..

Totally agree @MySereneBird. DMiL went very quickly from confabulation to delirium. So she went from filling in the odd memory gap to thinking there were people in the house (children playing in next door's garden) and those people were trying to murder her.

Obviously we sought help for the delirium

Should have said that my mum was attacked as a very young girl and my dad heard her screaming and rescued her..so we believe she's reliving this...
My parents started dating as young teenagers and had a wonderful marriage and were affectionate up until this started happening..
My Dad would forget and just go in for a kiss and cuddle... sometimes Mum would like it and reciprocate... but unfortunately more often than not it would start the accusations...
Devastated our whole family..
Luckily the neighbours were amazing and loved our parents...

Agree that in many cases it's just filling in the blanks. With my dad, at an earlier stage in the dementia (before the delusions about the bad men) he was aware that he couldn't remember things and that wasn't right. Often the confabulations were innocuous and pretty routine - oh that's a nice jumper dad, was it a birthday present? No, I bought it myself from Tesco. Or in discussion about what they'd been up to recently, he'd tell a story about getting in the car and driving to X town, having tea in a lovely coffee shop where they met friends and stayed at their house - none of it happened. All elements were true - they had a car which they went out in, they had been to X town before, they did have friends with the names he used, they had stayed at their house before. So his brain was just pulling together these familiar elements to construct what he thought had happened.

It was quite upsetting for mum, she used to contradict him and he would get very cross.

That sounds very upsetting for everyone @Marylou62. A DF has a similar thing with her DM. Always very quiet, kind and house proud she suffered horrendous DV in her second marriage. She's now reliving this and seems to be fighting for survival and has had to be sectioned whilst they try and find the right medication.

@Misthios the biggest problem we had with DMIL dementia was not her, it was DFIL and how he dealt with it. You have my sympathy.

Thank you...
And my Dad didn't know how to deal with it either...
He was terminally ill, absolutely exhausted with her night time escapes, humiliated by the awful accusations and always thought she'd get better..
I was sad he died but relieved..
Absolutely devastated about my wonderful mum..

That’s terrible @Marylou62. Sad and upsetting for everyone. Your poor Dad.

Thank you..
It was.. and we as a family are only now dealing with our grief about what has happened to Mum...
It's not fair...
The care home has been great..investigating her
(Potentially serious) allegations against residents, staff and visitors... but understanding that they are probably unfounded..
I don't envy them.

My Aunt in her 80's had dementia and when I visited her she often told me Dad had been to see her yesterday. My Dad had been dead for 30 years. I too was told not to contradict her. It is hard. I just said that was nice and changed the subject. She claimed she had been broken into by an armed person and rang my sister. No one there and no sign of a break in. Her handbag with money in was still on the coffee table. She claimed a dog had come into her house another time and stole a chicken. There was no chicken and no dog. The stage after was forgetting more or less everything she had told you. Her sister died. She was told and very upset. Within a week she was asking how her sister was. Sh was told again and got very upset again. By the weekend she was asking how her sister was. After telling her about her sister's death 3 times we just said her sister was fine as telling her repeatedly just caused her distress.

My late MIL believed herself to be back in WW2, and to have given birth to my SIL in the back of a van, but then this turned into complaints about people living in the loft and men forcing their way into the house. Horrible to have to listen to.

Unfortunately, the next stage involved her telling everyone she could that her late son in law had been abusing his DD, who by this time had also passed away, which was incredibly distressing for everyone, especially her DD.

Why does sex always come into it in one form or another?

Because people with dementia lose their inhibitions.

No always. I'm not sure DMIL ever enjoyed it and moved DFIL into the spare room at the first opportunity. Can't remember her ever once referring to sex.

I didn't realise how common this was with dementia. My mother went through the phase in the earlier stage of her dementia and lived 7 or 8 years after that stage. She spent a lot of the time searching for lost boys and was quite distressed when she couldn't find them. (Oldest sister of 6 brothers that she helped rear). She also used to talk about the old man in the house who owned it (maybe she was remembering my father who was dead)
The worst was the stage when she used to find out every day that my father /her brother/her parents were dead. Raw, fresh grief- so painful for her and nothing we could do at the time other than comfort her and when she'd have a cat nap, it was like that was wiped from her memory and she'd forget again. It was a relief when she thought at a later stage that they were alive and were calling in to her.
My funny memory was me pretending to phone an imaginary pub about an imaginary coat that she'd left there after an imaginary outing and she standing beside me announcing that there was no one on the phone.
No sex though , at any stage.
It's a tricky phase but it does pass and if it's harmless to the person, just agree.