ABSTRACT
Mental health nurses work within different policy contexts in different parts of the world. However, a number
of key principles appear to be similar, namely mental health promotion, healthy living, independence, integrated services and challenging age discrimination. The differences appear to be largely dictated by where older people mental services are located, i.e. whether older people with mental health conditions benefit from a general mental health policy that includes access, for example, to early intervention services, crisis services and psychological therapies, or are addressed within an older person’s generic policy that focus on the older person context rather then the mental health context. In some places, such problems have created an inadvertent discriminatory policy towards older people with mental health problems.
