Although Turkey is a country with a young population, the proportion of the elderly in general population is growing, due to better quality of life and easy access to health care services related to rapid urbanization. Beside its advantages, urbanization also creates some psychological distress for the elderly. Change from large to a nuclear family life style, forces elderly people to cope with loneliness and difficulties of the daily life in big cities. Health care and social services support nursing and elderly homes inadequately. Progression in geriatric psychiatry in the country is more obvious in recent years. Following our department at the Istanbul University, nearly a dozen of academicians became interested in the field and started their work in different institutions over the country, mainly in big cities. Beside meetings on psychogeriatrics with international contributions organized by our department every other two years, at least one session on topics related to geriatric population is organized in all meetings on general psychiatry. A considerable number of researchers in the field are published mainly domestically and fewer are in international journals. Depression and dementia, especially BPSD, which are also two major areas of interest in our department, are main areas of research of the other academicians. Except some differences to be clarified with further research, results from studies published so far show generally similar characteristics to western populations.
In this symposium, an overview of the profile related geriatric psychiatry in the country and major research results will be discussed in comparison to western studies.
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