With the growth of age, various functions of the human body enter the aging stage. During this period, immunity and physique decline rapidly, making the elderly prone to various mental problems. The mental problems of the elderly mainly include schizophrenia, manic depression, etc. These mental problems may become worse after a period of time, leading to dementia, which seriously endangers the physical and mental health of the elderly. At the same time, the mental problems of the elderly will also lead to the difficulty in taking care of themselves, and they cannot independently complete simple life skills such as eating and dressing. In this case, some elderly people may also have such behaviors as excluding contact with others and not cooperating with medical personnel in treatment and nursing, which in turn makes it difficult to alleviate mental problems. Therefore, the corresponding nursing measures should be implemented from both psychological and physiological aspects to explore the effect of relieving the mental problems of the elderly.

100 elderly patients with mental problems admitted in our hospital from January 2021 to January 2022 were selected as the research objects, and they were randomly divided into the observation group and the control group, with 50 cases in each group. The experiment was conducted with the consent of patients or their families to ensure the smooth development of the study. The elderly patients in the control group were given routine nursing care, while the patients in the observation group were given targeted psychological counseling on the basis of routine nursing care, including encouraging patients to actively express their emotions and actively communicating with patients. After four weeks, the relief effect of the elderly care system integrating physiology and psychology was illustrated by statistics of the self-management ability of the two groups of elderly patients.

The self-management ability of the elderly in the two groups after four weeks is shown in Table 1. The results showed that the self-management abilities of the elderly patients with mental disorders in the observation group, such as self-living ability and psychological state expression, were stronger than those in the control group after the integration of physiological and psychological elderly care measures, i.e., the elderly under conventional care, with a statistically significant difference (P < 0.05).

The mental problems of the elderly have become an important factor hindering the improvement of their quality of life. The study integrated physiological and psychological nursing measures when treating the elderly with mental disorders. The results show that it not only improves the physical quality of the elderly physically, ensures the normal life of the elderly, but also relieves the mental problems of the elderly psychologically, and thus has good clinical promotion value.Table 1.

Self-management ability of the elderly in the two groups after four weeks

Evaluation project	Control group		Observation group		$ {x}^2 $	P
	Quantity	Percentage (%)	Quantity	Percentage (%)
Active reporting of physical discomfort	38	76	48	96	16.611	0.000
Expression of psychological state	30	60	47	90	24.000	0.000
Self-life ability training	34	68	45	90	14.587	0.001
Description of excretion	32	64	47	94	27.125	0.000
Experience of side effects of drugs	31	62	44	88	18.027	0.000
Knowledge of fall prevention	32	64	48	96	32.000	0.000