ABSTRACT
Specialist mental health services for older people are a relatively new development, introduced in the United Kingdom only 20 years ago. Previously, a need for such services was not recognised. Later life mental illness was seen as an inevitable part of ageing and incurable.1 This was illustrated in the 1952 Diagnostic and Classification Manual where adjustment reaction of later life (over 65) and ‘senile dementia’ were the only diagnoses available for older people.2 From the 1940s various psychiatrists in the United States and the United Kingdom challenged such views, arguing that dementia was not an inevitable part of ageing and that other mental health problems could be experienced.1 A sufficient body of evidence was not enough to convince the psychiatric community of this until 1980s when the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 3rd edition, Revision (DSM III-R)3 noted that the diagnosis of schizophrenia could be given to people in late adult life.
