Depression is not limited to a specific age, gender, class or group and it does not know of any boundaries and is something that is widespread throughout the world. A group of people who are really affected by it are the elderly. Depression in the elderly coexists with the different disease processes that they are going through and the situation becomes worse and worse if their clinical condition just does not come under control.
There are a lot of different health problems that the elderly people are going through such as diabetes, chronic hypertension, back problems, joints aches and pains, cardiovascular problems, problems of the gastrointestinal tract such as constipation, diarrhea, polyps or masses in the colon, prostatic problems, etc. and all these problems just cause a lot of trouble that the elderly have to go through.
The one thing that we all really need to understand is that the depression in the elderly is an ongoing thing because the status of their disease process is chronic and they suffer from pain on a constant basis. They need a constant level of care and supervision in order to help them perform their activities of daily living. These illnesses just put these elderly people into a lot of negative thinking and they then fall deep into the color of depression.
According to a recent report, the rate of suicide is double in the elderly in the ages of 80-84, which is more than twice of the general population. Depression in people who are at the age of 65 is considered to be a pretty major health problem.
Depression in the elderly just worsens their healing process and the problems that they are suffering from just lingers on and just takes away from them the will to live. It is so sad to know all this that the elderly people in our community are going through these problems and what is being done about it. Do we realize that we are going to be elderly individuals in a matter of years and as this article is being written there is a giant block of people who are reaching into their elderly ages.
Are these people who are being moving on to be in the elderly group are going to suffer and go through the same things, if the answer is a yes, then we should know that we are the next ones in the line, and if we see that there are things that can be done to help prevent the elderly from going into depression or to help them out from getting into that state, then we can say that we do have a chance to live a better life in our later years.
We should contribute our best to help our senior citizens and help them maintain their activities of daily living and help them being alive inside themselves and prevent them from shutting themselves out. I believe that we can give a part of our time to the elderly people and therefore we will be able to contribute a greater value to our system to make it much better, may be tomorrow someone is going to think the same about us and we will have better times when we cannot do much for ourselves.