Anticipated and actual barriers to developing community mental health programs for the elderly

Teams of state and local agency professionals responsible for mental health and aging services participated in a model project utilizing education and consultation to facilitate community mental health programming for the elderly. Participants identified both anticipated and actual barriers to programming. Competing program priorities and lack of staff knowledge about mental health and aging were anticipated and confirmed as major barriers. Agency-organizational barriers were unanticipated, yet there were severe problems in cooperative interagency programming.