Professional shortages of geriatrically trained social workers pose a barrier to mental health care for older adults. Integrating graduate social work interns into primary care settings may increase the availability of trained social workers. However, few studies provide guidance on how to develop an interprofessional healthcare placement focused…

The need for clinical geropsychologists currently exceeds their availability, and this imbalance is expected to worsen along with the impending growth in the older adult population. Effective geropsychology mentoring may be helpful in meeting this challenge. However, little is known about mentoring within clinical geropsychology. The present paper…

Examined long-term benefits of bibliotherapy program for depressed older adults. Thirty of original 44 participants were assessed 2 years after treatment for depression. Found no significant increases in clinician- or self-rated depression. Most participants had not received other treatment, most felt their depression level had decreased, and over…

Recall was assessed three times for older adults in three groups: (1) participants in self-taught memory training (n=22); (2) delayed-training control group (n=24); and (3) attention-placebo group (n=23). The self-taught group's recall was superior to the control but equal to the attention-placebo group. Self-teaching resulted in improved…

Older diabetic adults should receive memory training to improve their compliance with medication taking. The intervention should include comprehensible medical instructions, assistance with remembering the nutritional values of food, and higher order skills for disease management. (SK)

This study examined the stability of treatment gains after receiving either cognitive bibliotherapy or individual cognitive psychotherapy for depression in older adults. A 2-year follow-up of 23 participants from Floyd, Scogin, McKendree-Smith, Floyd, and Rokke (2004) was conducted by comparing pre- and posttreatment scores with follow-up scores…

Conducted meta-analysis of 17 studies examining efficacy of psychosocial treatments for depression among older adults. Treatments were reliably more effective than no-treatment on self-rated and clinician-rated measures of depression. Effect sizes for studies involving participants with major depression disorder were reliably different from zero,…

Thirty-one community-residing older adults age 60 or over either received 16 sessions of individual cognitive psychotherapy (Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery, 1979) or read Feeling Good (Burns, 1980) for bibliotherapy. Posttreatment comparisons with the delayed-treatment control indicated that both treatments were superior to a delayed-treatment control.…

Examined efficacy of bibliotherapy for 67 mildly and moderately depressed older adults. Cognitive and behavioral bibliotherapy were compared with delayed-treatment control condition. Results indicated that both experimental conditions were superior to control condition; cognitive and behavioral bibliotherapies were nondifferentially effective.…

Developed interview-based Geriatric Depression Rating Scale (GDRS) and administered 35-item GDRS to 68 older adults with range of affective disturbance. Found scale to have internal consistency and split-half reliability comparable to those of Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression and Geriatric Depression Scale. Concurrent validity, construct…

Investigated the efficacy of bibliotherapy with mildly to moderately depressed older adults (N=29). Observed significant treatment effects with cognitive bibliotherapy superior to the attention control on all measures. Suggests self-help programs may be a viable alternative or adjunct to meeting the mental health needs of the older adult.…