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We think of adults as being vulnerable if they’re permanently or temporarily unable to care for themselves and their interests, either through a mental or physical cause. Vulnerable adults are open to risks of psychological and physical harm or being exploited for other people’s benefit.

We can think of the following groups of people as ‘vulnerable adults’:

older people who are physically or mentally frail

people with learning disabilities

people with a mental health condition such as dementia or personality disorder

people who are ill and need help to carry out normal daily functions

people with physical disabilities

people who have undergone a recent trauma – a bereavement, a divorce or loss of a job, for instance

people who, for whatever reason, are in abusive relationships or are homeless.

But we need to be careful about who we consider ‘vulnerable’. Just because someone is, for instance, older, or has a mental health condition or a learning disability, or has a physical disability, they are not necessarily ‘vulnerable’. Indeed, they may take great offence if you were to consider them so. We need to be wary of applying ‘labels’ to the people in our care.

We also need to recognize that being vulnerable isn’t necessarily a long-term state. People who come into hospital for operations, for instance, will be very vulnerable immediately before, during and after the operation when they are not able to care for themselves and rely on health care staff to protect them and ensure their well-being. But in the vast majority of cases they will soon be completely independent again, so the vulnerable state is only temporary.

Mental ill-health is a broad term that is often used as an umbrella term to incorporate many different mental health

 problems and mental illnesses.

A mental illness is something which a medical professional will diagnose. It is a disorder that will interfere significantly with a person’s 

emotional abilities, cognitive abilities and social abilities. 

There are many different types of mental illness and they can have different degrees of severity.

Examples of mental illness include psychotic disorders (like schizophrenia), mood disorders (like anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder), personality disorders and eating disorders.

Mental health problems are different from mental illnesses as they usually resolve themselves with time or with a situation change. They are usually shorter in duration than mental illnesses and often occur because of life stressors. They can also interfere with an individual’s emotional, social or cognitive abilities and if the mental health problems increase in severity or persist over a longer time period, they could develop into mental illness.