Art Therapy and Cognitive Behavioural Decline

Subjective Cognitive Decline (SCD) is the self-reported experience of worsening or more frequent confusion or memory loss. This could include forgetting where your car keys are, where the TV remote is – or even where you live, what your friends’ names are or how to get home. It is a form of cognitive impairment and one of the earliest noticeable symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.

SCD can have implications for living with and managing chronic disease, or performing everyday activities like cooking, cleaning or even getting dressed. As SCD is self-reported, it does not imply a diagnosis of cognitive decline by a health care professional.

But what is ‘cognition’?

Cognition is a combination of processes in the brain that includes:

The ability to:

• Learn
• Remember
• Make judgements

The frequent forgetting of how to perform routine tasks can affect a person’s ability to live and function independently. Plus there is a huge below to self-esteem, to confidence when tasks that were once routine now seem increasingly difficult to do; objects that were always to hand now seem to have been misplaced.

This very short course goes through the main factors causing cognitive decline and shows how art therapy exercises are likely to slow down such decline. Therefore the course is extremely useful for anyone worried about their own memory loss and/or the cognitive decline of a loved one.