Functional Psychiatric Disorders of the Elderly

From our regular book review column.

Functional Psychiatric Disorders of the Elderly represents an international multiauthor effort at encapsulating the geropsychiatric literature of the nondementing disorders. An outgrowth of the 1990 symposium by the same name, Functional Psychiatric Disorders of the Elderly, of the Geriatric Psychiatry Section of the World Psychiatric Association, this text ambitiously aims to focus attention on the most frequent but often less "organically" conceived psychiatric syndromes encountered in the elderly. The heaviest emphasis has been on affective disorders, subdivided into chapters covering the epidemiology, phenomenology, diagnosis, and treatment.