Mental Health Care for Elderly Poor
- 13 Aug 07, 3:39 PM
As a person with a mental health condition, I found this is a . Everybody gets old and yet suddenly (as with other NHS health services) people over the age of 65 are cast aside and an inferior mental health service is provided.
If anything, the elderly need more intensive holistic care than the young, because they have other physical problems such as arthritis which may well be contributing to poor mental health.
But for years, the UK Government and the mental health system has been upside down in it鈥檚 thinking, preferring to direct resources to the young or middle aged population. Pure age discrimination.
The elderly do matter. They are people with feelings and needs just like anyone else. Why should they have to suffer, just because there鈥檚 not enough money to go round, or it has been squandered in the wrong direction?
I never want to be old if this is how society, the UK Government and the NHS treats elderly people. It鈥檚 like something out of a horror movie, yet the UK Government comes out with the same old rhetoric time and time again and refuses to do anything significant about it.
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Comments
I agree that elderly people (and any people with mental health conditions) should receive holistic treatment. Not just a pill (though medications DO help a lot for SOME people). Even in cases where a pill does help (and not everyone benefits from medication enough to be worth the side effects), as you point out, there may be other issues that need to be addressed. Physical problems contributing to the mental health issues that need to be addressed separately. Counseling and therapy for those who will benefit (some do, immensely--but it's not necessarily for everyone).
But also: people do tend to acquire a range of disabilities as they grow older -- hearing loss, vision impairment, etc. And society still isn't fully inclusive of disabled people generally, of any age. And where accommodations do exist, many elderly people either are not fully informed of their options (how many elderly people use closed captions or subtitles to watch television? I bet not many) or are uncomfortable taking advantage of them because they don't want to admit that they are disabled. Which comes back to the stigma that society still holds toward disabled people: if ALL people were raised to be more comfortable with disabilities and not see them as inherently tragic or limiting, then elderly people might accept a little more easily that, yes, they are now disabled (deaf, blind, arthritis, whatever) -- and more actively seek out ways to keep on doing at least some of their preferred activities even if it means, for example, using a wheelchair part of the time instead of their walker when they want to travel longer distances. Seizing more control of their lives might help prevent a certain portion of their depression before it starts.
I really don't know how this can happen in modern day Britain, such a depressing story but one that needs to be taken notice of.
This makes me think of my grandmother. She went into hospital a few months after her husband died, and kept forgetting he was gone. Every time I saw her, she would ask how he was and was gently reminded "do you remember, he died last year" and would get upset all over again as she realised. Then, she started thinking that men who walked past were him, getting upset that my grandad was going to visit other women on the ward and couldn't understand why he was ignoring her. It had to be explained time and again that they weren't him, couldn't be him. I found this very sad and she obviously found it upsetting. Now I wonder whether she could have been put in a different area, maybe a side room, or at the far end so she didn't get all the visitors walking past her bed, something to ease her distress.
Elderly people may be treated for physical conditions and impairments, but I agree that the mental ones need to be considered too.
On a more amusing note, before she was ill, my grandmother always used to worry that she was getting "premature dementia" - this concern went on well into her older years and we had to explain the meaning of the word "premature" and that she seemed fine in any case!
Exactly, that's what social inclusion is all about. Cater for the most disabled and you automatically include everybody else. Everybody benefits from a better quality of life e.g. with mental health it would be a less stressful working environment. I can't see what the problem is.