Paper on Older Adults: Mental Health Disorders & Anxiety/Depression

The older adults in society face the risk of suffering from mental health disorders. Some of the mental health disorders that they may experience include dementia, depression, Alzheimer’s disease, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. In the case presented by the patient, they seem to be suffering from anxiety and depression (Feng et al., 2019). Among the causes of anxiety and depression in older adults is the fear of death due to their old age and the diseases and complications that they suffer from (Giang et al., 2019). Additionally, older adults suffer from depression and anxiety on account of the financial situation that they will leave behind, with those who are not financially stable feeling that they are failures and this leads to their inability to live in peace in their old age.

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A mental health assessment should be conducted on the patient to help the mental health professional to get a look into the mental health situation of the patient. The mental health professional will conduct an assessment by asking a variety of questions to the patient, especially on the symptoms that they have suffered from and the effects that the symptoms have had on the relationships of the patient and their physical, emotional, and mental well-being (Cohn et al., 2018). Through assessment of the symptoms seen in the patient and the extent to which the symptoms have affected them, the psychiatrist will conclude the extent to which the mental health condition has gotten in the patient in question (Reynolds et al., 2019). The patient may also be required to fill out the Zung self-rating scale for depression, which is a set of 20 questions that help in assessing the extent to which the patient has been affected by the situations that they face. Scores between 50 and 69 indicate the existence of depression, and scores above 69 are showing the presence of severe depression.

Therapeutic Ways of Treating People with Depression

Psychotherapy, especially through the use of talk therapy is important in the treatment of people undergoing depression. However, talk therapy on its own is not effective in the treatment of people suffering from clinical depression, since there is a need for the patients’ hormonal imbalance to be balanced so that they can develop a balanced mental health condition. Psychotherapy helps in helping people undergoing depression to find ways to deal with the stressors they experience daily, therefore leading to a serene and calm mind, which results in managed depression levels. The psychotherapist in charge gives the individuals undergoing depression the chance to get new perspectives on the issues that they face, and therefore helps them develop better ways of dealing with the stress that they face which leads to the depression that they experience in their daily experiences.

References

Cohn, J. F., Cummins, N., Epps, J., Goecke, R., Joshi, J., & Scherer, S. (2018). Multimodal assessment of depression from behavioural signals. In The Handbook of Multimodal-Multisensor Interfaces: Signal Processing, Architectures, and Detection of Emotion and Cognition-Volume 2 (pp. 375-417).

Feng, Z., Jones, K., & Phillips, D. R. (2019). Social exclusion, self-rated health and depression among older people in China: evidence from a national survey of older persons. Archives of gerontology and geriatrics, 82, 238-244.

Giang, L. T., Nguyen, T. T., & Tran, N. T. T. (2019). Factors associated with depression among older people in Vietnam. Journal of Population and Social Studies [JPSS], 27(2), 181-194.

Reynolds III, C. F., Lenze, E., & Mulsant, B. H. (2019). Assessment and treatment of major depression in older adults. In Handbook of clinical neurology (Vol. 167, pp. 429-435). Elsevier.