A comprehensive examination of geriatric psychiatry must include the perspectives of multiple disciplines. The authors of previous chapters addressed the physiological, neurological, and psychological changes that accompany the aging process. In this chapter, I examine the social and economic conditions of late life. (For the sake of convenience, henceforth the shorter term social factors will be used, although economic factors also are addressed.) Particular attention is paid to the ways that social conditions serve as risk factors for psychiatric disorders, as contingencies that affect the course and outcome of mental illness, and as determinants of mental health service utilization.