Depression and the elderly

Abstract

About two decades ago, “Open Care Centers for Aged Citizens” have been established in Greece. These facilities consider as members everyone older than 65 years and provide social opportunities, entertainment, activities, education and work on artistic objects, as well as basic first degree health care by visitors physicians.

We performed an investigation with Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS 15 and 4) among the members of two such centers in order to examine the probable prevalence of depression in this population. Our sample consisted of 51 persons (38 females and 13 males) with average age 72±5.7 years. Besides the GDS we examined parameters as: marital status, education, known organic (somatic) or mental health problems.

From our results we mention that 23.5% of all (7 females and 5 males) were scored in GDS-15 over 5 and were referred for further psychiatric evaluation about the existence of depression. Only one of them was already diagnosed as depressive before our investigation.

Given that the population of these centers is generally considered as “healthy, active and functional” in comparison with other people of the same age, the above found percentage indicates that we must focus our attention on aged people trying to find out early indications of mental health problems and especially depression.