[Verse 1]
When sorrow wears an elder's face, it rarely shows its name,
No tears announced, no darkness claimed, the symptoms shift and change,
The GDS-fifteen asks simply, yes or no, plain speech,
Thirty items when you need the fuller, deeper reach,
The PHQ-nine counts somatic weight — but mind its crooked seams,
For sleep disrupted, appetite adrift means more than depression seems,
Fatigue may speak of illness too, the overlap is wide,
Adjust your clinical lens before you let a score decide
[Chorus]
GDS for the elder voice, Cornell for the fog of mind,
Where cognition clouds the sadness so the patient can't opine,
GAD-seven, Penn State worry, Geriatric Anxiety —
Somatic masks and irritable grief demand our scrutiny,
Score the sadness, name the dread, but read what hides beneath,
Depression without sadness still has teeth
[Verse 2]
The Cornell Scale was built to hear what proxy and staff report,
When dementia dims the self-report, observe the face, the tort —
The Hamilton and Beck were normed on populations young,
So somatic items carry phantom weight on older tongues,
Apathy wears depression's coat but answers are divergent,
One is loss of drive itself, the other, grief emergent,
Distinguish blunted dopamine from sorrow wrapped in stone —
Misread that parosmia of affect and the patient's left alone
[Chorus]
GDS for the elder voice, Cornell for the fog of mind,
Where cognition clouds the sadness so the patient can't opine,
GAD-seven, Penn State worry, Geriatric Anxiety —
Somatic masks and irritable grief demand our scrutiny,
Score the sadness, name the dread, but read what hides beneath,
Depression without sadness still has teeth
[Verse 3]
Anxiety in elders walks as agitation, sleepless nights,
Not the ruminating monologue of anxious younger sights,
The Geriatric Anxiety Inventory — twenty items true —
Knows that older adults somaticize their worry through and through,
The Penn State Worry Abbreviated, eight brief lines,
The GAD-seven captures well but watch its lower baselines,
Insomnia may be the only dialect the aged dread employs —
Decode the body's argot before you name it noise
[Bridge]
Then grief arrives — its complicated kin,
The Inventory of Complicated Grief, the PG-thirteen,
Prolonged grief disorder needs its own precise accounting,
Not depression, not PTSD, a third peak mounting,
Yearning, bitterness, identity dissolved —
Bereavement screened distinctly, not subsumed, not solved
[Chorus]
GDS for the elder voice, Cornell for the fog of mind,
Where cognition clouds the sadness so the patient can't opine,
GAD-seven, Penn State worry, Geriatric Anxiety —
Somatic masks and irritable grief demand our scrutiny,
Score the sadness, name the dread, but read what hides beneath,
Depression without sadness still has teeth