From Wikipedia:
Dementors
The dementors are "soulless creatures among the foulest beings on
Earth": a phantom species who, as their name suggests, gradually deprive
human minds of intelligence. They are the guards of the wizard prison, Azkaban, until after the
return of antagonist Lord Voldemort.
In the books, dementors have a generally human shape, approximately
3 metres (10 feet) in height, covered in dark, hooded cloaks that reveal
only their decayed-looking hands. Beneath the cloak, dementors are eyeless, and
the only feature of note is the perpetually-indrawn breath, by which they
consume the emotions and good memories of human beings, forcing the victim to
relive its worst memories alone. According to the author, dementors grow like
fungi in dark, moist places, creating a dense, chilly fog. Although they are
implied to be sentient,
this is left ambiguous. The presence of a dementor makes the surrounding
atmosphere grow cold and dark, and the effects are cumulative with the number
of dementors present. The culmination of their power is the 'Dementor's Kiss',
wherein the dementor latches its mouth onto a victim's lips and consumes its psyche, presumably
to leave the victim in a vegetative state. Dementors are invisible to Muggles,
but affect them otherwise identically.
JK Rowling's play on words is, I think, very revealing. Dementia sucks the psyche of it's victims. Dementia patients have their lives sucked out of them by the disease.
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