Dr. Lina Shihabuddin is the Chief Population Health Officer with RWJ Barnabas Health, and she has an extensive and wide-ranging background in healthcare: she has trained in internal medicine, psychiatry and geriatric psychiatry, hospice and palliative medicine, and more. On today’s episode, we dove into elderly mental health, holistic healthcare and the incredible role that geriatric psychiatrists play in taking care of our aging population. Dr. Shihabuddin explains the need for more access to geriatric psychiatry for our aging population, and the types of care we can offer for elderly patients with cognitive diseases. Finally, we discuss the future of psychiatric care and what still needs to be established as the norm in order to keep our communities healthy and cared for.

Key points from this episode:

• The importance of mental health in holistic care
• The challenges of an aging population in psychiatry
• The difficulty of patient access to geriatric psychiatry, and how we can improve this
• Care beyond psychiatry that can help mitigate the effects of cognitive diseases