Psychiatric Assessment and Fundamentals Q 27

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Nurse Benjie is communicating with a male client with substance-induced persisting dementia; the client cannot remember facts and fills in the gaps with imaginary information. Nurse Benjie is aware that this is typical of?

  

     A. Flight of ideas

     B. Associative looseness

     C. Confabulation

     D. Concretism

    

    

Correct Answer: C. Confabulation

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Confabulation or the filling in of memory gaps with imaginary facts is a defense mechanism used by people experiencing memory deficits. Confabulation is a type of memory error in which gaps in a person’s memory are unconsciously filled with fabricated, misinterpreted, or distorted information. When someone confabulates, they are confusing things they have imagined with real memories. A person who is confabulating is not lying.

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Option A: A nearly continuous flow of accelerated speech with abrupt changes from topic to topic that are usually based on understandable associations, distracting stimuli, or plays on words. When severe, speech may be disorganized and incoherent. It is part of the DSM -5 criteria for Manic episodes.

Option B: In cases of severely disordered thinking, thoughts lose almost all connections with one another and become disconnected and disjointed. 8 This illogical thinking is called derailment or “loose” associations. In simple terms, the thinking process is frequently derailed, characterized by very weak or loose associations.

Option D: In the analytic psychology of Carl Jung, a type of thought or feeling that depends on immediate physical sensation and displays little or no capacity for abstraction. In some traditional societies, such thinking may manifest itself in fetishism and belief in magic. In the modern world, it may display itself as an inability to think beyond the obvious material facts of a situation.

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