Complex Emotional Needs in Older Adults

There is a lack of recognition of the distress and support requirements resulting from complex emotional needs (commonly referred to using the term ‘personality disorder’) in older people.

These difficulties can be disregarded, minimised and framed through a different lens by older people themselves, health and social care practitioners with whom they are working and commissioners of services.  This unfortunately results in a relative dearth of research, assessment and outcome tools, clinical development and strategic planning in this area.

A presumption that clinical needs remain homogenous across the life course allows the neglect of older people’s complex emotional needs to persist.  An example of this is access to a service being based on the receipt of a diagnosis of ‘personality disorder’, a diagnostic categorisation derived from an understanding of presentation of younger people which rarely represents the clinical picture of older people and so is rarely applied, leading to access to appropriate services being denied to this group.

This webinar presents a new resource, Older Adult Complex Emotional Needs: Recommendations for Services, to ensure that access to appropriate care and support and associated resources and planning are enabled for older people with complex emotional needs. It supports the importance of offering appropriate interventions based on need not age, but also the need to review medication and deprescribe to reduce unnecessary and potentially hazardous polypharmacy in older people with complex emotional needs.

A recording of the webinar will be made available after the event.