These findings should be of interest to treatment-providers. It is the rare clinician who ignores patient personality in creating and sustaining patient relationships, formulating assessments, and planning prevention, treatment or service-delivery strategies. Rather, clinicians adopt nuanced and complex views of their patients. By introducing the idea of personality styles to geriatric psychiatry, we aim to avoid the Scylla of the standard one-trait emphasis on, for example, Neuroticism and the Charybdis of examining personality disorders with dubious validity and relevance to older adults.(55) Moreover, an emphasis on styles points to different approaches to depression prevention and treatment in the elderly. Because low Conscientiousness by itself or in combination with other domains confers risk for incident depression over and above that posed by Neuroticism, strategies to enhance the ability of individuals to identify or maintain roles, hobbies, and routines may be particularly effective,(56) as deficits in these goal-oriented behaviors are distinguishing features of patients low in Conscientiousness. Our findings point to the potential utility of personality styles in identifying patients who might benefit from a trial targeting the prevention of major depression. Such an approach should be the focus of future intervention research.
