Some mental or emotional changes in older adults

Abstract

Introduction: Mental or emotional changes in older people have been one of the influencing factor that impacts on physical health and causes disease. Moreover, older adults aged over 50 experience feelings of loneliness losing their partner and social isolation when they are retired. Psychopathology in older people has become one of the most important discipline in global mental health field in the 21st century. As for Mongolia, in association with the increase in an average life expectancy, not only physical illnesses but also mental health issues have been found to be an urgent problem. Aim: To investigate some mental and emotional changes in the elderly people Methods: The study was conducted among the older persons living in Yesunbulag province. Randomly selected 250 older adults were involved in the study. To collect the data, the psychological approaches including SRQ and GAD-7 scale were employed and the results were analyzed on SPSS software. Results: 1. The study shows that older people more often experience chronic fatigue, mental anxiety, physical disorder and depression. In addition, these stressrelated disorders were directly associates with the aging. 2. 75% of the study participants experienced with mild form of common anxiety disorders and 25% had moderate and severe anxiety forms. Conclusion: Older adults in the study experienced or suffer from stress-related disorders, and 86.3% of those had a direct correlation with the aging. (P=0.001). However, mild form of common anxiety disorders mostly occurred among the older adults, 24.9 % of the participants had moderate and severe forms of anxiety disorders. In addition, common anxiety disorders are not relevant to the aging. (p=0.602)