Seeing The Light Of Day

The baby boomers are longer-lived than previous generations, but they still experience similar rates of mental illness. Day clinics may be the way to address this concern.

- Naomi Arnold

When most of us think of elderly mental-health problems, we think of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. But psychiatric disorders such as depression and anxiety are rife in older people, too, and they often go undetected and undertreated.

It’s a problem that’s set to get worse as ageing baby boomers put pressure on health services. Although lifespans have doubled in developed countries during the past 200 years, “healthspan” – healthy, disease-free lifespan – hasn’t increased at the same rate. That includes mental illness.

But the mental-health needs of older people differ from those of the young. How should older people be cared for? Perhaps, as suggested by a recent study at New Zealand’s only psychiatric day hospital, the Canterbury District Health Board’s Burwood Day Clinic, some of them would do best at a mental-health day clinic. It’s a place that bridges the gap between community care and hospital.

The study, published in the New Zealand Medical Journal in August, included data collected since 1987 and involved 380 patients aged 65 years and older, most of whom were cognitively unimpaired. It found that all measures of mental wellbeing increased from intake to discharge, and that day-hospital treatment for older people may be an effective method of treating psychiatric disorder.

The author, Burwood clinical psychologist Petra Ann Hoggarth, cautions that the study can’t definitively say that day clinics do cause improvements to elderly mental health; there was no control group, for one thing. And psychogeriatric day hospitals are an astonishingly poorly studied area; Burwood’s is only the second-ever study on this topic and comes 17 years after the previous one was published on a German day clinic (which also found day hospitals helped improve mental health for older people).