Older people and mental health issues

Mental health and older people's services have for many years been neglected by policy makers and given low priority in resource allocation. The Mental Health Foundation is working to ensure individuals and organisations create policies and design programmes to promote all aspects of older people's well-being, including mental health.

It is estimated that 18% of the general population in the UK are of pensionable age and that this figure will grow to 20% by 2025.

As a society, we tend to assume that older people will develop mental health problems as a ‘normal’ aspect of ageing. Most older people do not develop mental health problems, although a significant minority does. For example:

about 25% of people over 85 have dementia
between 10-15% of people over 65 have depression
between 4-23% of older adults seen by medical staff have an alcohol problem

In addition to those older people who have an identifiable mental illness such as dementia, there are many who experience psychological or emotional distress associated with isolation, loneliness or loss. These problems are not recorded by the health or medical care system.

In 2006, Age Concern and the Mental Health Foundation joined forces to support the launch of a report from an independent Inquiry into ‘Mental Health and Wellbeing in Later Life’.

We are currently producing a comprehensive work programme on older people’s mental health issues, which will feed in to our policy work.

We want you to have your say on policy work including older people and mental health issues. By providing your contact details, we will be able to:

inform you of which policy work subjects we are concentrating on
invite you to feed in your opinions and experiences to help inform our policy work
build up a database of people who are interested in contributing their views on policy and mental health

Complete the 'Have your say' online form