ABSTRACT
This chapter describes in more detail the pictures presented by affective disorders in late life. Affective illnesses appear for the first time with increasing frequency from adolescence on right through adult life, but the more severe forms have their greatest incidence between the ages of 40 and 65. Accounts of the way in which these three types of depression had taken hold of individual patients do not suggest that neurotic depression represents the early and initial stage of psychotic depression. Many neurotic depressives do not come to be counted at all, either because they do not see their doctors, or more likely because their doctors treat them for their somatic complaints alone. Increasing numbers are now recognised as depressives by their family doctors, but many of them never refer any old people to psychiatrists. Affective disorders of the elderly nowadays are eminently treatable conditions.
