This book has adopted a lens on mental health in later life that marks it out as distinctive. It conceptualises mental health as an outcome of a life course, including later life itself, and foregrounds the role played by social and structural inequalities in shaping mental health and well-being (Wistow et al, 2015). It has required the synthesis of material from a large number of theoretical, conceptual, practice-related, research and policy sources. While there are many texts that focus on mental illness, there are far fewer that focus on mental health and fewer still that attempt to weave together evidence from critical gerontology, life course analysis, research on inequalities, and work on exploring the issues that undermine, and/or promote, mental health and well-being. The intersection of these axes is where my book is situated and discourse located.

The term later life has been deliberately used in place of old age or its sister terms throughout the book (most of the time). One of the most damaging consequences of constructing ‘old age’ as a separate life stage(s) is its disconnection from the rest of life. Age-related risks become the dominant paradigmatic lens through which mental health is viewed, and connections with what has gone before and the wider determinants of ill health become lost, or at best, marginalised. This lens engages with a chain of responses that turn away from social structures and socially determined risks and face towards individualised treatment and support. That services or commissioners tend not to take account of an older person's biography in developing responses to ‘need’ and practitioners rarely engage with life course issues is testament to this pattern. It is more comfortable too. Most people struggle to think about the depressogenic effects of long-term poverty on older women's mental health whereas being depressed as a response to being widowed is both understandable and treatable. It is sad but (perhaps) inevitable and not in any way linked to the woman's life course or socio-political issues relating to gender inequality, domestic abuse or inadequate welfare benefits.

The value of a life course approach is its capacity to inform and make links between life stages, experiences, inequalities and biography and to illuminate patterns. One of the key challenges – in a book focused on later life – is the need to accommodate the whole life course.