Extramural Psychiatric Care and the Elderly

Abstract

To keep psychiatric patients as much as possible in the community rather than have them admitted to mental hospital is a policy which has become more and more favoured and has been shown to work (Leyberg, 1959; Silverman, 1961; Sainsbury et al., 1963 and Hoenig et al., 1965, etc.). This type of management cannot be expected to be equally successful with all groups of patients and is perhaps most open to question as regards the illnesses that affect the elderly.