Mental Health Needs of the Elderly Vary by Setting

To learn more about elderly patients who use outpatient mental health services, we retrospectively reviewed the charts of 75 patients overage 60 treated in an inner-city community mental health center during a 1-year period and compared them with 34 patients in a hospital-based psychogeriatric clinic and 26 patients in a suburban geriatric outreach program. The patients in the three settings differed with regard to age of onset and type of psychopathology, use of psychotropic medication, and mental health needs.