Depressed Older Adults: Education and Screening

This volume is one of the best practice-oriented books on mental health and aging that I have read. I hope that the coming years will see substantive developments in outreach to depressed older adults. This book lays a solid and credible foundation for these efforts.

"--PsycCRITIQUES"

Late life depression has become increasingly prevalent among older adults. This book presents guidelines to help enable aging and social service programs to establish a mental health education and screening program focused on late-life depression. This 2-time award-winning model presented in this book offers a practical and culturally-sensitiveapproach to mental health education which can be adapted by service programs seeking to identify clinical depression among their older adult clientele.

Additionally, this program offers professionals serving older adults an opportunity to increase their knowledge about clinical depression among older adults; develop the skills necessary to identify the signs of clinical depression and suicidal ideation; and create long-standing, collaborative relationships across the professional disciplines of aging, social services, medical and mental health services. Older adults who participate in this program are able to:
increase their awareness of the role of mental health in their overall quality of life
identify both long-standing and newly emergent symptoms of clinical depression, a serious mental health condition
connect to treatment providers within their own communities