This small report of no more than eight pages is the work of a sub-committee which met under the chairmanship of Professor Jack Tizard, Research Professor of Child Development, University of London, Institute of Education. The five members of the sub-committee included a psychologist, a psychiatrist, an educationalist, a paediatric neurologist, and a senior inspector of special schools.

This is the title of the National Association for Mental Health's Mind Campaign Report No. 6. The document is a plea to the Department of Health and Social Security for a clear and comprehensive statement on what provisions are to be made for the elderly mentally ill. Obviously the Department's document on the future of hospital services for the mentally ill, issued last December, has caused the Association some anxiety. It was made clear that the Department's policy is to move psychiatric in-patient facilities from the large, often isolated mental hospitals into small general hospital units. This is an admirable policy, but unfortunately little has yet been said about what should be done for old people with psychiatric disorders. The suggested general hospital units will not be able to provide anything approaching an adequate service for this group of patients. It has been suggested by some that the psychiatric services should only concern themselves with old people with so-called functional disorders, leaving the large group labelled as demented as the responsibility of either the geriatricians or local authority social service departments. This would mean that the small general hospital psychiatric unit would be able to cope, even with old people, provided they were not so inconsiderate that they had symptoms attributable to dementia, and co-operated by getting well quickly. This approach would still leave us with the problem of the large number of old people at present in psychiatric hospitals. The Report quotes the usual figures, showing that there are 52,000 patients over the age of 65 in mental hospitals at the present time. Of these, 27,000 are over 75 years of age. Over the past 15 years, the number of in-patients of all ages in mental hospitals has decreased by 31 per cent. During the same period, the number of patients over 75 has increased by 50 per cent. The Department of Health and Social Security estimates that, on the basis of existing trends, almost two-thirds of the patients in mental illness hospitals might be aged 65 and over by the year 1980.