AAG Report: Mental Health and Wellbeing in Older Age: What can be done?

This AAG published a report of its 2019 pre-Conference workshop on ‘Mental Health and Wellbeing in Older Age: What can be done?’. 

Mental health and wellbeing are critical to ageing well, but the areas tend to be poorly addressed, with greater attention often given to older people’s physical health than their mental health.  The workshop was held at the 52nd AAG Conference in Sydney 2019, with the aim of encouraging greater awareness of the issues and generating ideas about what needs to change. 

Among some of the themes emerging from the Workshop were:

~ In the ageing field there is a divide between concepts of mental illness on the one hand and wellbeing on the other, with serious psychiatric illnesses often being overlooked and misdiagnosed. 

~ Greater funding, attention and support are needed to improve older people’s mental health, including more services, better training of staff caring for older people, better use of screening instruments, greater collaboration within health care teams and across external systems, and greater attention to the needs of informal carers and disadvantaged groups.

~ Ageism and stigma are barriers to improving responses to mental health conditions in older people

~ Community building is a key factor in addressing the social isolation and loneliness of many older people

~ Town planning and housing design are also important environmental factors

~ Psychosocial approaches and resilience building to help give older people a sense of purpose were also highlighted.