Howard H. Fenn – författare

This book offers mental health guidelines for all medical professionals facing the emerging challenges presented by an aging population worldwide.  The text acknowledges that as the geriatric demographic grows, limited resources and infrastructures demand quality protocols to deliver inpatient geriatric psychiatric care, and that many physicians may not be trained to address these specific needs.  This text fills this gap with guidelines assessing, diagnosing, and treating aging patients as they present in the emergency room and other settings.

Unlike any other text, this book focuses on how to optimize the use of the inpatient setting by recommending evaluations and treatments, and offering flow-charts and figures of key points, to guide both general workup and continued evaluation and treatment. This approach aims to minimize instances of premature release or readmissions and to improve outcomes.  

Chapters cover the various issues that clinicians face when working with an older patient, including legal topics, limitations to treatment, prescription-related complications, patients struggling with substance abuse, and various behavioral concerns. Written by experts in the field, the text takes a multidisciplinary approach to deliver high-quality care as needs of the aging population evolve.

Inpatient Geriatric Psychiatry is a vital resource for all clinicians working with an aging population, including geriatricians, psychiatrists, neurologists, primary care providers, hospitalists, psychologists, neuropsychologists, emergency room and geriatric nurses, social workers, and trainees.

This book offers practical age-adjusted recommendations to treat the most common psychiatric symptoms and syndromes in the geriatric patient. The principles described here are not new; advice for prescribing to the aging patient has always been to “start low, go slow.” This book fleshes out that dictum based on research evidence, clinical experience, and trends in the literature. An age-adjusted approach endorses medication interventions when needed as part of a comprehensive treatment plan. A combination of psychotherapeutic interventions, non-pharmacological modalities, and judiciously managed medications can improve quality of life and minimize risks inherent in pharmacotherapy applied to aging physiology.

Age-Adjusted Psychiatric Treatment for the Older Patient is divided into five sections, covering the foundations of evaluation and treatment, neurocognitive disorders, psychiatric syndromes, therapeutics and interventions, and special topics. Each chapter begins with a complex case example that illustrates the topic. It then reviews current evidence-based evaluation and treatments. Age-adjusted recommendations, distilled from the literature, are offered at the end of each chapter. The intent is to provide actionable advice to supplement, but not supplant, good clinical judgement, which can improve quality of life by managing psychiatric symptomatology while averting untoward results.

This volume is an essential guide for experienced clinicians as well as trainees across many health care disciplines, both generalists and geriatric specialists, who all see increasing numbers of aged patients with psychiatric symptomatology.