Subscribe to one of our news e-mail lists . Someone hit a nurse. One woman abruptly pinches another patient's face and yells curses. Another breaks into loud, gasping sobs for no apparent reason.
Agitation keeps still others awake all night.
A geriatric psychiatrist employed to care regularly for nursing home residents like these because he is specially trained in treatments to calm, even prevent, such problems. Although up to 80 percent of the nation's 1.6 million nursing home residents have a mental illness, mostly dementia or depression, experts say few nursing homes provide proper psychiatric care crucial to seniors' quality of life. The group is beginning a campaign to change that by modeling care on practices like Anderson's. Nursing homes were set up to treat chronic physical problems, not the explosion of Alzheimer's, other dementia, and depression accompanying the nation's booming elderly population. Typically, nursing home doctors are primary care physicians with little mental-health training, Reichman said, who thus often don't know about new treatments that help such patients without sedating them into zombies.