Last year, I had a cancer scare. During a routine colonoscopy, my doctor found a polyp. When I got the phone call from my GI doctor himself, and he said, “we found cancerous cells. We need you to come back for a second colonoscopy,” the…

In my more than 20 years providing therapy to dementia caregivers, I often hear some version of:  “Around other people they’re pleasant and conversational, but with me they just shut down or get short-tempered. They could treat me differently if they wanted to.” The truth…

For more than 20 years as a Geropsychologist, I’ve received calls from people searching for a therapist for an older loved one — or a colleague looking for a referral. They weren’t asking for anything extraordinary. They wanted someone who understood depression in later life,…

I’ve been providing psychotherapy to older adults for more than 20 years. And one of the things that has never stopped breaking my heart is how often older adults do not get the mental health care they need, resulting in unnecessary suffering. Depression that goes…

In the field of geropsychology, it is well known that depression is both a risk factor for and an early symptom of dementia. One of the most consistently missed diagnoses I see in clinical practice with older adults is depression in the context of dementia.…

I think about a therapist who had been meeting with an older client every Tuesday for nearly a year. At first, the changes were easy to explain away: a missed appointment here, a repeated story there, a moment of losing track in the middle of…

A family member calls asking you to see their older loved one who’s living with dementia. In psychotherapy with adults, that call raises red flags. Who is the client? Who holds the decision-making authority? Where do the boundaries fall? But with older adults navigating life-altering…

A clinician in my Mental Health + Aging Certificate program recently asked a question. He was reflecting on the opening module — the one where I lay the foundation for who we are providing therapy for, where I explore intersecting identities, share important statistics, and…

“I feel like I’m doing time for a crime I never committed.” That’s what one of my older patients said to me in our very first session after he was moved unexpectedly from his home into assisted living. He wasn’t exaggerating. He wasn’t being dramatic.…

I was settling in for a long travel day on an airplane — when I found myself in one of those unexpectedly meaningful conversations that remind me why I do this work. The man sitting next to me was in his early 60s. He and…

What if I told you that nearly half of all older adults — not a small, extraordinary handful, but almost half — actually improve their cognitive and physical functioning as they age? Not maintain. Not slow the decline. Improve. I know. That probably feels like…

If you spend any time on social media, you have probably seen it — a well-meaning post, shared thousands of times, warning that caregivers are so depleted, so selflessly devoted, that they often die before the very people they are caring for. It is a…