They offer a safe and comfortable space to talk freely and openly about one’s experiences. They can provide an opportunity for older adults to connect with peers who have gone through similar struggles, providing a forum to share advice and strategies that have proven successful in managing their addiction. Assess older adults’ level of social isolation and explore all possible sources of social support they have. The Lubben Social Network Scale (LSNS) is designed for use with older adults. It measures social isolation and focuses on the nature of older adults’ relationships with family and friends.1222 Older clients can easily complete the six-item short version (LSNS-6), a self-report questionnaire.

Co-Occurring Psychiatric Disorders

Even if a screener is negative, the TIP consensus panel recommends that you occasionally rescreen clients. Substance use patterns can also change with life events, cognitive functioning, and mental health status. The NIDA Quick Screen V1.0 is a brief screener that asks https://ecosoberhouse.com/ about a client’s past-year use of alcohol, tobacco, prescription drugs (nonmedical use), and illegal drugs. If a client answers “yes” to the question about using illegal drugs, follow up by giving a slightly longer screening tool called the NIDA-Modified ASSIST V2.0.

Conducting Brief Assessments and Interventions

Older adults have lower prevalence of substance use than younger adults, which may lead clinicians to think that older adults do not use psychoactive substances or develop SUD. Furthermore, recent cohorts of individuals ages 65 and older tend to show a higher prevalence of lifetime substance use than that seen in prior generations (Chhatre et al., 2017). Knowledge of substance use disorders (SUD) in adults ages 65 and older is limited.

Items for Older Adults on Suicide Prevention and Postvention

Your practice should also identify steps to take when screening tests are positive (see the section “Communicating Screening Results”). The main reason for screening and assessment is to help you decide whether, where, and how to address substance misuse. Given the growing prevalence of chronic diseases in the aging population of North-eastern states in India, efforts to prevent chronic diseases and improve health behaviours are needed in the region. A step has been initiated by the Government of India for control and prevention of the highly occurring non-communicable diseases such as Cancer Diabetes, Cardiovascular diseases, and Stroke [51]. Moreover, findings reveal the prevalence of smokeless tobacco to be the highest in the North-eastern region of India which is in support of previous literature [40].

Health and Wellness

Using DSM-5 criteria to make an SUD diagnosis.534 Using an SUD assessment instrument based on DSM-5 criteria will improve diagnostic accuracy. The CDC’s Timed Up & Go is one of the easiest ways to assess a client’s fall risk. This test measures a person’s ability to stand from a sitting position, walk a short distance (10 feet), turn around, substance abuse in older adults and walk back to where the individual was sitting. Instructions for how to give the Timed Up & Go are available online (/steadi/pdf/TUG_Test-print.pdf). If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you may want to assess the client for fall risk. Remember the importance of helping clients feel safe physically and emotionally.

This belief can be internalized by older adults, leading them to avoid treatment. On the positive side, because individuals ages 65 and older are eligible for Medicare, insurance is less often a barrier to care. Also, baby boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) came of age when opinions about alcohol, marijuana, and other drugs were changing.

• Provides information about the scope of substance use in older adults, the risk factors for substance use disorders in…
• For those seeking resources, organizations like AARP and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) offer valuable information and support for older adults and their families dealing with addiction.
• Bolstering resilience in older adults helps promote healthy aging, improves responses to developmental tasks and challenges, and heightens quality of life.1212 The ability to cope with stressful situations is a key factor in preventing relapse from SUDs (see Resource Alert).
• Several medication and nonmedication treatments can improve sleep problems.
• As director of the Geriatric Day Hospital program, as well as the psychiatry clerkship, Lehmann feels an urgency to educate psychiatrists and physicians across all specialties about what she calls an under-recognized national public health problem.

• Several risk factors create a perfect storm for addiction to take hold in later life.
• The twelve-month prevalence of alcohol use disorder (AUD) and drug use disorder (DUD) (the NSDUH does not publish disaggregated information on specific drugs for adults ages 65 and older), were 1.6 percent and .4 percent, respectively.
• Living in the home with someone who misuses substances or has a mental disorder.

See Chapter 2 of this TIP for more information on key strategies for providing support to older adults. Facilitate engagement and active participation in community-based mutual-help groups. The final section identifies targeted resources to support your practice, some of which appear in full in the Chapter 7 Appendix; additional resources appear in Chapter 9 of this TIP. Exhibit 7.1 provides definitions for key terms that appear in Chapter 7.

Important Definitions Regarding Substance Abuse, Addiction, and the Elderly

For example, Medicare Part B takes care of costs for services in opioid treatment programs. Finally, a third important direction will be to ensure increased attention to social determinants of health (Blanco et al., 2020). Gender and racial inequities and stigma increase the risk of SUD at all ages and can act as a powerful barrier to treatment. Lack of social support, which often increases with age, can increase the risk for and worsen the course of, SUD.

Chapter 7—Social Support and Other Wellness Strategies for Older Adults

This questionnaire includes a checklist of symptoms and open-ended questions about alcohol use.331 A score of 1 or higher suggests problem alcohol use. Choose a method for drug and alcohol screening that you can use with all older clients. Be aware of your beliefs about/attitudes toward older clients that make you not screen for substance misuse. Older adults experience substance-related functional impairment, which providers may have a hard time detecting in older clients who no longer work, drive, or have significant obligations to others professionally or at home.

Tobacco Screening and Cessation

These programs often address not just the addiction itself, but also the underlying issues that may have contributed to it. Many signs of addiction can be mistaken for other age-related issues, leading to inappropriate treatment or no treatment at all. Healthcare providers need to be more vigilant in considering addiction as a possible cause for various symptoms in older patients.