Friday, June 8, 2007

Old Age Psychiatry

Seminars in Old Age Psychiatry; Edited by Rob Butler and Brice Pitt
The full text of this College textbook is available here, and has been provided as a service for members of the Faculty of the Psychiatry of Old Age.
http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/publications/collegeseminarsseries/oldagepsychiatry.aspx
Who even knew there was such a thing as a Faculty of the Psychiatry of Old Age?
I did a google search of Brice Pitt after reading this article:
Psychiatrist Brice Pitt on Ian McKellen's King Lear
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/theatre/drama/story/0,,2095667,00.html
With our ever aging populations, I found this line interesting:
When Lear punched Kent, I found myself thinking: "This old man is the terror of the nursing home." That is a type of character I know very well. Like Lear, he usually has a history of arrogance and tremendous impatience. People will say of him, "He was always very difficult, but now he has become impossible-"
I doubt that Canada is assessing the terror of the nursing home beyond determining the level of progressive sedation required to manage the problem. Do Psychiatrists visit nursing homes and who is diagnosing the specific type of dementias in the nursing home population?

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