Old Age Mental Disorders in Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Abstract

An earlier paper (Kay, Beamish and Roth, 1964b) described 26 features that differentiated significantly between mentally normal and functionally ill subjects over the age of 65, or between normals and those with organic mental illness. These features were found to fall into four main groups concerned with (i) physical disability, (ii) social isolation, (iii) personality deviation, (iv) social and income status. Many of the features appeared clearly to be inter related, but to an unknown degree, and this complicated the interpretation of the results. In the hope of shedding some light on this problem, a factorial analysis of 34 features, including most of the 26 previously described, was carried out. Because of missing items, the number of patients was reduced by 27 to 267, consisting of 152 mentally normal subjects, 88 subjects with functional illness, and 27 with organic mental illness. This report is complementary to the two previous articles (Kay, Beamish and Roth, 1964a, 1964b), in which the method of selecting the subjects and the definitions of organic and functional disorder are fully described.