Evidence-Based Counseling and Psychotherapy for an Aging Population

At a time when the mental health difficulties/disorders of the elderly are coming to the fore of many practitioners' patient rosters, naming and treating those problems is still too often handled as an art as much as a science. Inconsistent practices based on clinical experience and intuition rather than hard scientific evidence of efficacy have for too long been the basis of much treatment. Evidence-based practices help to alleviate some of the confusion, allowing the practitioner to develop quality practice guidelines that can be applied to the client, identify appropriate literature that can be shared with the client, communicate with other professionals from a knowledge-guided frame of reference, and continue a process of self-learning that results in the best possible treatment for clients.

The proposed volume will provide practitioners with a state-of-the-art compilation of evidence-based practices in the assessment and treatment of elderly clients. As such it will be more clinically useful than anything currently on the market and will better enable practitioners to meet the demands faced in private and institutional practice. Focusing on the most current research and best evidence regarding assessment, diagnosis, and treatment, the volume covers difficulties including, but not limited to: social isolation/loneliness, elder abuse/neglect, depression and suicidal inclinations, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, dementias, prolonged bereavement, patients with terminal illnesses.

Because concrete research evidence is so often not used as the basis for practice, this book provides a timely guide for clinicians, social workers, and advanced students to a research-oriented approach to serving the mental health needs of elderly adults.