Guest Editorial: Mental Illness in Older Adults

Mental illness in older adults is an important issue: It is estimated that 20% of older adults in the general U.S. population have a mental illness (Bartels, Blow, Van Citters, & Brockmann, 2006). Mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and substance use disorders affect older adults, yet there is little in the literature about these topics when compared with the volumes that are written about dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. A cursory search of the term dementia in the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature resulted in 18,469 articles; however, the combined search terms mental illness and older adults returned only 98 articles. The numbers improved when specific psychiatric diagnoses were searched. For example, depression and older adults yielded 1,788 articles, and anxiety and older adults resulted in 389 articles, still far fewer than those related to cognitive disorders