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Treating PTSD Symptoms in Older Adults

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Evidence Based Treatments for Trauma-Related Psychological Disorders

Abstract

We live in a society that idealizes youth. Every day we are exposed to advertisements, social media, and TV programs casting the young and beautiful. In our careers, social arenas, and health systems, we are encouraged to be fit, healthy, strong, slim, beautiful, efficient, exciting, quick, etc. These are all qualities that are more pronounced in youth and decrease in old age. At the same time, fewer children are being born in the Western world, and people live longer. This leads to a growing proportion of older people in society, who lived long lives and who are likely to have experienced many losses or even traumas. Older people are not as fast, efficient, or healthy as the young ideal, and they are often seen as rigid and predictable: “When you know one old person, you know them all.” Following this line of thought, it is often presumed that older people are neither willing nor able to change their ways. But is that really so? This chapter investigates trauma reactions in older people, the efficacy of psychotherapy with older people in general, and the treatment of posttraumatic stress reactions in older people in particular.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Unit for psychooncology and health psychology (EPoS), Department of Psychology, School of Business and Social Sciences, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Maja O’Connor

  2. Department of Psychology, National Center for Psychotraumatology, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

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  1. Maja O’Connor
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Correspondence to Maja O’Connor .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Hospital Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Ulrich Schnyder

  2. Dissemination & Training Division, National Center for PTSD, San Franciso, California, USA

    Marylène Cloitre

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O’Connor, M., Elklit, A. (2015). Treating PTSD Symptoms in Older Adults. In: Schnyder, U., Cloitre, M. (eds) Evidence Based Treatments for Trauma-Related Psychological Disorders. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07109-1_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07109-1_20

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