ABSTRACT
“Mindfulness Meditation” is now a thoroughly tested and successful clinical technique. A central theme in geriatric psychiatry has been whether depression becomes more common in old age. Gerontologists do their best to find ways to document and quantify problems of health, social support, income and demographics and to take these into account when analysing changes in people’s reports of their levels of happiness during different times of their lives. Mary Lunn and Kate Hunter explored an explanation for this by taking the analysis a stage further and looking at relationships between scores on the Yesavage Geriatric Depression inventory and sex, cardiovascular and circulatory problems, diabetes and intelligence in the entire Newcastle volunteer panel. The risk of severe depression markedly increases in that small minority of unfortunate elderly people who suffer dementias. A different issue in discussing morale in old age is that everyday terms such as “depression”, “anxiety” and “sadness” do not precisely capture different shades of feelings.
