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This study compared the frequencies of various diagnoses of mental hospital patients over the age of sixty-five, "paying particular attention to the high frequency of organic and low frequency of functional disorders reported among these patients in the United States" as compared with London. One important reason for making this diagnosis correctly is that previous studies have indicated the "prognosis for survival among the elderly is twice as good for the functional as organic patients." Improper diagnosis may become a self-fulfilling prophecy: therapists will most likely have less enthusiasm for treating organic patients, and valuable treatment opportunities may thus be missed.
Patients diagnosed by project psychiatrists as having affective disorders had high levels of depression and low levels of organic symptoms such as impaired memory, aphasia, and disorientation. The opposite was true for patients with dementia. Of these organic symptoms, disorientation showed the greatest level of difference, while impaired memory showed the least difference. "These findings would seem to indicate that disorientation when present is one of the best symptoms for discriminating between affective disorder and dementia in the geriatric age group and that impaired memory, which occurs in both conditions, is the symptom most likely to cause diagnostic confusion." The latter