Deliberate self‐harm in the elderly

Abstract

Abstract This article reviews 145 patients over the age of 65 years seen at a district general hospital after deliberate self‐harm between 1973 and 1985. There was no significant change in the numbers seen per year, and they comprised 5.4% of all the hospital's self‐harm cases. The male to female ratio was 1:1·5 although the self‐harm rates for males and females over 65 in the local population were identical. Fifty‐five per cent widowed, over 90% of the patients had depressive conditions, only 3% had an established dementia, and 63% had significant physical illness. Half the patients received inpatient psychiatric treatment. Under 10% of the patients gave a history of earlier self‐harm, while both the repetition and suicide rates were very low. These findings are discussed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 79 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.