Which Mental Health Providers Work with Older Adults?

#098- Learn the difference between therapist, psychiatrist, and neuropsychologist when it comes to finding mental health care for older adults.

Knowing what each professional does will help you to identify the mental health professional best able to address your most immediate need.

Here’s an overview of the three most common licensed mental health professionals who specialize with older adults.

LEARN MORE about each professional here.

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Transcript

Which mental health professionals work with older adults? I'm Dr. Regina Koepp. I'm a board certified clinical psychologist, and I specialize with older adults and families. In today's video. I'm going to lay out the three mental health providers who commonly work with older adults. 

Here's why this is important. Knowing what each of these mental health providers does, will help you target where to start with helping to get your older loved one or older client, the care that they need. The first is therapist. Therapist is a broad term. It's an umbrella term that describes what the person does - therapy. So talk therapy where you meet one-on-one or as a couple or a family with the therapist, a therapist often helps to manage or treat mental health concerns, especially among older adults related to depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, getting new health and mental health diagnoses, like say a new diagnosis of cancer or, heart disease or dementia disorder. A therapist can be a social worker, a psychologist, a licensed marriage and family therapist, a licensed personal counselor. All of these professions can call themselves a therapist. What's really important here is that the person is licensed in the state that you are looking for care in. 

So therapists often offer individual psychotherapy sessions. So again, that's talk therapy. Those sessions might last 45 to 60 minutes for an individual session or 45 to 90 minutes for a family session, depending on the therapist, depending on the condition. Often therapists work with clients once a week. Once every two weeks, it's really up to you and your therapist to figure out your frequency.

Most therapists only provide therapy, but some therapists like psychologists, like myself might also provide outside of therapy. Assessments. And so might provide an evaluation to help determine if an older adult can continue to manage their finances, can make medical decisions. And so on. But for more extensive evaluation, you'll want to check out a neuropsychologist, which is where we're going next. 

All right, let's talk about neuro-psychologists. So neuro means brain and a psychologist is somebody who has a doctoral degree and typically is licensed to be able to call themselves a psychologist. So a neuropsychologist is a psychologist of the brain, but their main function is assessing and diagnosing brain conditions. And this is where they come in for older adults. Because dementia disorders are brain disorders. And so neuropsychologists are incredibly helpful in identifying, does the person have a dementia disorder? And if so, what is the dementia disorder? There are many different types of dementia disorders, Alzheimer's disease being the most common then vascular dementia, then Parkinson's and Lewy body dementia. 

And so on. So having a neuropsychologist do a formal evaluation can take several hours and often might be done over a course of a few days. And then typically the neuropsychologist will meet with you and your loved one, the older adult to give feedback about what the testing showed. 

Many older adults who don't have dementia, just want to get a baseline of how their brain is functioning now, so that as they age, they can compare how their brain is doing down the road to how they're doing now. And neuropsychologists can often help with that as well. Earlier I mentioned capacity evaluations, neuropsychologists also commonly conduct capacity evaluations. 

So meaning that they can assess whether or not a person is able to manage their medications, manage their finances, make medical decisions, provide some contribution or thoughts into whether or not a person can live independently. Some of these decisions like independent living need to be made with a team, including occupational therapy, physical therapy, primary care, maybe a geriatrician, maybe a neurologist and so on, but from a mental health perspective, it's a neuropsychologist who is best equipped for making those evaluations and providing that feedback. 

And third a Gero psychiatrist is a medical doctor who specializes in the mental health and brain health of older adults. They're not a neurologist. They generally prescribed medications to help manage symptoms related to depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, dementia disorders, and so on. They might or might not provide psychotherapy. Some Gero psychiatrists might also provide capacity evaluations related to whether or not a person can manage their money or make medical decisions or manage their own medications. Every person operates within their own scope of practice. So it's really important to ask what that provider does. And then follow their lead in what they say they can and cannot do if they can't do something, ask for guidance about where to get that need met. 

All right. If you need help finding a mental health provider who specializes with older adults, I invite you to check out our national provider directory. It's free at www.mentalhealthandaging.com. There you will find therapist, neuropsychologist, Gero psychiatrists and more. I hope you check it out.