Thanks, Unhappyguy! Your information and comments are appreciated! I wonder, though, whether what I see as the real, underlying situation is consciously appreciated. I certainly haven't ever (ever) seen it addressed directly in anything I've read. So I'll try and express it here, though I've never even tried to do it before and don't know how well a first attempt will come out.

I would think that all of us human beings (and animals too for all I know) have internal, psychological "weather" in which we live and think and feel and act at all times. It sometimes gets better and sometimes gets worse, for reasons some of which we know and some of which we don't. There's no question but that it's terribly subjective, which makes it harder to talk or write about.

Some of this "weather" is good, some neutral, some bad. It's my impression, as a lay person, that people with mental problems have more bad internal "weather" than people without such problems. And everything such people do each day, whether they have to or choose to, frequently has to be done in the face of more bad weather than people without similar kinds of problems.

Perhaps for some bad weather comes in spurts or episodes or alternates with good or neutral weather. For others internal bad weather can be pretty constant, perhaps differing in intensity but always there. And here we get to the relevance of internal bad weather to healthy living.

I think it takes more energy, more willpower, more force, for people with frequent or permanent internal bad weather to surmount the difficulties and pains of doing healthy things. Or, rather, their bad weather compels them all too frequently to do unhealthy things to counteract or protect themselves against their internal pain and misery. Self-medication or whatever you want to call it (but it would include lots of comfort food and sedentary behavior, not usually thought of as self-medication).

NOT to use such means to alleviate their situations translates into suffering. Or more suffering than they're willing to tolerate or, perhaps, capable of tolerating. So asking many (not all) mind-afflicted persons NOT to smoke, NOT to drink, NOT to eat starch, fat or salt, or NOT to spend the day on the sofa, is, to my mind, much more than asking an unafflicted person to do so.

The situation of us seniors doubles down on those problems. We may have lived an entire lifetime immersed in bad habits for reasons of mental weather. And the longer a bad habit persists, the harder it is to change, particularly if it's used to avoid pain. And then, of course, we may feel that it's pretty much over now, so why suffer to make changes?

In thinking about starting this thread I was (and still am) wondering about what kind of information and encouragement would be of particular use to afflicted seniors in overcoming their much greater inertia when it comes to living a healthy life. That's really all we deal in here at PC, information and encouragement. And I don't really know if there's anything else one CAN use in such situations.

No one, including mentally afflicted people, will disagree with the proposition that it makes much more sense to live a healthy life. But the subjective costs of doing so, for us, are frequently (not always) higher than they are for other people. And I started this thread to find out whether all of us could, by putting our heads together, figure out more effective ways of getting people in our situation to put up with a healthy way of life.

Now, I'm fully aware that there are many of you who will read this who live perfectly healthy lives and can't really relate to what I've said. But the health and mortality statistics prove without possibility of contradiction that people with mind problems are significantly more unhealthy than the average. And then, if and when you make it to old age, you really have to wonder whether changing now is going to make any difference at all.

How can we energize and infuse with hope seniors like ourselves who need something more, something extra to drop their bad habits and purchase a few more years of healthy life?

Over to you!