Mental Health Issues in the Elderly

MENTAL HEALTH OF THE ELDERLY

In the absence of many rigorous large-scale epidemiological studies examining mental healthamong the elderly in Africa, Asia (with the exception of China) and Latin America, we include mainly small studies in this review. Comparisons among thesesmall-scale studies are difficult because they differ interms of purpose (i.e. measuring different types of mental illness), methodology (i.e. use of differentdiagnostic tools and criteria for caseness), and study samples (i.e. community vs clinical, and total adult population vs strictly the elderly). Furthermore,sociocultural factors contribute to the differential manifestation of psychiatric disorders, making comparisons of studies on these disorders fromdifferent societies problematic. Due to the great heterogeneity within populations in developing countries, results from some studies cannot even begene ralized to the whole population of a country oreven a particular region of a country. Despite these limitations, the following studies collectively offer ourbest insight into the burden of mental illness amongelders in the developing world. Throughout the review we focus on cultural interpretations of observed differences among dissimilar societies.

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