Old patients in mental health research

Abstract

The present study takes a diachronic corpus-assisted discourse studies approach (Partington et al. 2013) to examine the representation of mentally-ill elderly patients in medical research articles, in the fields of psychology and psychiatry, published between 1950 and 2019. Despite evidence of the expanding scope of mental health research in more recent years, nihilistic views about mental health assessment and intervention underpin the discourse around mentally-ill older adults across the time span under consideration. In the literature, ageing is variously constructed as a process leading to deprivation, resignation and physical decay, increasing the chances of the onset of mental illnesses. The perpetuation of these discourses, which confirm and propagate discriminatory age-bias positioning on the part of medical researchers, specialists and the health community at large, may constitute a significant obstacle to an improvement in the quality of mental and physical health care provided for the older population, both currently, and without substantial intervention, for the foreseeable future. Overall, it is hoped that this article has not only made a valuable contribution to the understanding of ageing from a historical discourse analysis perspective, but may be of interest to mental health scholars and professionals alike inspiring them to question their knowledge and practices about and for older patients.