The recent fashion, pervading both the lay and professional biomedical literature, for doomsday predictions to dominate discourse about the (dreaded) ‘aging population’, is becoming both tired and rather disquieting. This is particularly so as it occurs in in the context of continued neglect of elderly people within broader psychiatric research.
Thus, the more optimistic tone of this multi-author handbook is a welcome relief. Edited by David Burke and Ayse Burke from St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, and authored by current or past members of the Psychogeriatric Mental Health Service at that hospital, it considers the psychiatric issues of old age from multiple perspectives, including individual clinical issues, service model and structure concerns and population health topics.
The book is concise and generalist with a focus on a pragmatic clinical guide to practice. The clinical section is further divided into chapters around assessment and management of common clinical scenarios and topics specific to old age. Within its review of population health, there is a substantial focus on issues, assessment and management for carers.
The authors generally manage to find that frequently elusive balance between academic detail and practical advice. This should substantially widen the potential readership as it allows quick access to desired points and ensures this is not a profession specific handbook. It would likely be of some interest to the full spectrum of medical, allied health, nursing and even administrative disciplines involved in providing care and support for older people. While aspects may be too ‘simple’ for those already specialists in an area, the cross-discipline nature of the book means most are likely to find something of use for their practice.
Dot point advice for approaches to specific assessments (e.g. around capacity), and excellent use of problem focused tables, could also foreseeably prove very helpful for medical students or specialist trainees in approaching new situations, or even clinical exams. Prudent use of clinical case examples may have further enlivened these practice points. Such sections are, however, well equipoised by more discursive passages around clinical dilemmas, socio-political and ethical concerns.
Minor quibbles include: the odd placement of the brief chapters on squalor and hoarding and homelessness at the very end of the book; the Australian-centric nature of some of the information, particularly in relation to legal and welfare issues; and, the absence of any substantive discussion around specific concerns for cross-cultural; indigenous and rural or remote living older people.
Notwithstanding, such succinct, cross-discipline collation of most of the pertinent issues in ‘real-world’ Old Age Psychiatry is uncommon and means this book should, in contrast, become common-place in the shelves of those already working with elderly people, and in reading lists for those training to do so.
