Health Sciences 2711A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Life Review, Major Depressive Disorder

• School: Western University
• Department: Health Sciences
• Course: Health Sciences 2711A/B
• Professor: Marie Savundranayagam

Document Summary

The prevalence of mental illness decreases with age but these can be underreported by older adults. Sometimes its also hard to determine if something is a physical health problem or mental health problem because mental health systems have symptoms like fatigue. We also need to look at the social context when looking at mental illness like an older adult who loses interest in activities because of the reduced actoivities available to her in a nursing home. Unique challenges loss of social support, loss of income since you cant work, also need to think about lifetime exposures to stigma connected to lifecourse perspective. Also need to look at drug use in earlier life to treat conditions. Also need to look at institutionalization in large mental health hospitals. Major depressive disorder depressed mood or loss of interest in pleasure for more than 2 weeks. This will have impact on social and occupational functioning.