Eccentric is this the same as going senile or dementia?

Excentricity is a choice dementia is not

Eccentric is leaning over to pet a skunk. I can do that. They know who their friends are.
Dementia is thinking the skunk is your pet dog, so you try to give him a bath to get the stink off.
LOL let's keep this going....:-)

I love this question!

Eccentric is what many characters in British novels are. Also some American novels set in the South. There are probably just as many eccentric people in the Midwest (for example) but we tend not to use that term much. (We tend to describe such people as "a little weird, but harmless.")

Senile is an obsolete term. It used to be used to describe cognitive and behavioral changes that occurred in old age. It is one of the reasons Dementia appears so much more prevalent now -- people weren't diagnosed with it in past generations, they were just considered "senile."

Dementia is a neurological condition. Upon autopsy it can be seen quite plainly in the brain. There are 50 or so kinds of dementia and what shows up in the brain will identify the kind of dementia exactly.

I have a friend -- a math professor -- who wears shorts to teach his classes until the weather absolutely makes that impossible. (His classes sometimes have a betting pool about what day he will first show up in long pants, in the fall.) I guess I'd call him mildly eccentric (or a little weird, but very smart, and harmless, as we'd say in the Midwest).

A person who wears totally inappropriate clothes -- a bathing suit to a wedding or shorts outdoors in the winter -- probably has some cognitive problems, such as dementia.

My grandmother was said to be "senile" the last few years of her life, spent in a nursing home. Today she would be considered to have dementia.

Eccentric is wearing a big red floppy hat, fur coat and knee-high boots in 90-degree weather, building metal sculptures in your front yard, and decorating the exterior of your house with broken pottery shards. Dementia is wearing nothing at all in -20 degree weather while sitting in the front yard making mud pies. Make sense? The eccentric knows exactly what they're doing and do it because it's fun and it makes people look at them funny. The dementia patient has no idea what they're doing or why.

No. Eccentric is not as maladaptive as dementia. Dementia could make eccentricity worse and the combination is likely worse than either alone - the ability to compensate for eccentricity and still be functional would tend to decline and things that worked, however oddly, for years on end would tend to fall apart.

I've been eccentric all my life. Maybe dementia will make me centric?

Eccentric is an "always" thing. Senility and dementia are generally old - age onset.

I think of 'eccentric' as being more of a personality trait whereas dementia is a disease.

I wouldn't classify being eccentric as going-senile [dementia]. Famous people such as Mark Zuckerberg [Facebook] and Jeff Bezos [Amazon] are considered being *eccentric*. Also the late Howard Hughes.