INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GERIATRIC PSYCHIATRY, VOL. 9 335 (1994)

BOOK REVIEWS

Mental Health Services-Law and Practice. Larry Gos- tin. Shaw, 1986.

My heart sank when this book arrived in my in-tray. My secretary struggled to lift and unwrap the parcel, weighing over 5% lb. I found a loose-leaf bound book organized into eight parts. The idea is good - as health services, law and practice change, chapters can be rewrit- ten and updated when necessary. The book that I received included nine supplements which had either rep- laced outdated material or were additional to the original text. After purchase of the book one can register for this Supplement Service. Nevertheless I was irritated to find that the text was still out of date, even taking into consideration its age, in a number of important areas, in particular the politically driven changes in our service culture.

Larry Gostin, an American lawyer who was the Legal Director of MIND in the early 1980s, not only cham- pioned patient rights but became an ‘honorary’ forensic

psychiatrist whose knowledge of psychiatry, mental health law and psychiatric services was unrivalled. For this reason I would recommend that this comprehensive book be purchased by anyone who wishes to have a refer- ence book that covers the whole field of mental health law. But it will appeal more to a forensic psychiatrist than to a psychiatrist of old age. Nevertheless, the readers of this Journal will find much of interest, in particular the chapter on patients’ property and financial affairs, which in the appendices is complemented by copies of the relevant statutes and statutory instruments. This is therefore a book to dip into, refer to, and to use as an aid to teaching. It is perhaps not an essential acquisition of the busy practitioner, but it deserves a place on every hospital and academic library bookshelf sturdy enough to carry the weight!

PETER SNOWDEN University of Manchester

Ageing, Independence and the Life Course. Edited by SARA ARBER and MAMA EVANDROU. Jessica Kingsley, 1993. No. of pages: 256.

This is one of those useful books that looks at a familiar world through a new perspective: the life course. It sus- tains the notion that old age is a different phase of life but presents research to show that the explanations for a lot of what we see lies in the previous lives of people, rather than in ageing itself. The experience of increasing dependence in old age is, for example, especially painful if you have experienced the struggle for independence through a lifelong disability (Zarb). Several themes emerge through this perspective, predictably class and income, but also reciprocity.

Much of the book raises questions for which we do

not have answers because our research has concentrated on seeking explanations from the present. Much research on housing, for example, has focused on sheltered hous- ing rather than looking at the experience of housing for different groups of people over the last 50 years or so and the light this might shed on older people’s attitudes to housing and home.

There is nothing on psychiatry in this volume, which is a sad omission, not least because we might gain useful insights into attitudes to the experience of mental illness in old age using a life course perspective.

MARY MARSHALL Dementia Services Development Centre

University of Stirling

0 1994 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.