Why you are never too old to start therapy
Three moments changed Maurizio’s life after he decided, at 70, to begin therapy: working through his divorce, confronting conflicts with his children, and learning to build a new social life as he eased out of full-time work. “I never thought it could be too late for anything,” he says.
He had originally sought help hoping to trace the roots of migraines he’d suffered since age seven, after years of consulting doctors without finding a single cause. Even once he accepted there might not be one answer, he kept going. “The process itself became something meaningful, a space for introspection that helped me understand my life more clearly,” he says. (Surnames of therapy clients in this piece have been withheld to protect their privacy.)
Antonio, 73, and his wife Gigliola, 68, turned to therapy to save a marriage strained by years of disappointment and things left unsaid. “After some time, I realised I felt lighter, more open,” Antonio says. Gigliola agrees: “Looking within ourselves and bringing out what we could never say before perhaps helped us.”
Their experiences cut against a common assumption — that therapy is a young person’s pursuit — even though evidence increasingly shows older adults can benefit just as much. World Health Organization figures put the share of over-70s dealing with a diagnosable mental health condition, most often anxiety or depression, at around 14%, and this age group accounts for 17% of all suicides worldwide. Yet a 2024 study found that psychological therapy reached only about 4% of Americans aged 65-plus, compared with roughly three times that proportion — 12% — among 18- to 24-year-olds, and 8% among 35- to 64-year-olds.
That gap exists despite there being no evidence therapy works less well later in life, says Pim Cuijpers, professor of clinical psychology at Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit. “Therapies work across the whole adult age,” he says, noting his own review of psychotherapy for depression found no difference in effectiveness even among patients over 75. Completion rates among older patients can reach 54%, often higher than among younger adults — a sign, Cuijpers suggests, that those who seek help later in life tend to be strongly motivated. Group therapy, a 2025 review found, produces especially strong results, likely because it offers a structured way to connect with others — valuable for older patients also facing isolation or chronic illness.
Access remains uneven. Cost is one barrier, since insurance may not cover therapy and private fees can be prohibitive. Referral bias is another: treatment usually starts with a GP, yet older adults are referred for psychological help less often than younger patients with similar symptoms, their distress sometimes written off as a normal part of ageing rather than a treatable condition.
Some of that prejudice traces back to Sigmund Freud, who argued therapy stopped working past 40 or 50, according to Rossana De Beni, professor of experimental psychology at the University of Padua. In his 1905 paper On Psychotherapy, Freud wrote that beyond a certain age “the elasticity of the mental processes, on which the treatment depends, is as a rule lacking”. That claim is “absolutely not true”, De Beni says — “studies show the opposite”. She argues clinicians must see older patients as whole people, not simply “an old person”, and warns that entrenched ageist assumptions can be internalised by patients themselves — damaging, since ageism itself can fuel anxiety and depression.
“Ageing, right to the very end, is a stage of life marked by change,” De Beni says. “People become more fully themselves in a process of continuous transformation, learning and flexibility that never truly ends.” Maurizio hopes his own experience might encourage someone else to try. “I think it may have planted a small seed: not today, not tomorrow, but perhaps the day after, they will bring it out and water it,” he says.
Source: BBC News