Advisors need to get ready to take on the role of family therapist as more and more clients need help with the issues of aging.

“People are older and healthier than we’ve ever dealt with, and they’ll experience a longer and longer decline,” said author and speaker Nick Murray Thursday at Financial Advisor magazine’s seventh annual Inside Retirement conference in Dallas.

“The financial aspects, as critically important as they are, become almost footnotes” to the real issues of retirement, Murray said—helping clients deal with problems of aging, both their own challenges and dealing with parents.

“I see an ever-darkening future for you; as people get older, they don’t die but begin to break down physically and mentally,” Murray said.

The breakdowns will still come “on schedule” when people are in their 80s, they just won’t die, he said. As a result, advisors will spend a greater proportion of their time dealing with the emotional issues of aging.

“You go out to dinner with people of my age [of 72], and by the time the main course comes, somebody’s talking about all the problems they’re having with their mother, who’s losing her mind. … Does this strike no one but me as something we have never experienced?” he asked, with 70-somethings having to worry about their parents?

“All through history, no one knew what Alzheimer’s was; it was always there, but nobody lived long enough to get it,” Murray said.

Now half of Americans at age 85 get the disease, Murray said. “I think this is just one aspect of the profound changes in life that the people we counsel will have to be dealing with.”

Clients will turn to advisors for help with stressful decisions, like how to take the car keys away from an elderly parent. “You’re going to get that call,” Murray said.

“I’m not sure we see the emotional demands that will be put on us,” he said. “We’re not going up that learning curve anywhere fast enough.”

Murray urged advisors at the conference to “start thinking about expanding the scope of your discovery” with clients. “The whole issue is being proactive about it, just asking [clients] if they are ready for the inevitable.”

A passionate advocate for long-term investing in stocks, Murray couldn’t help but take a swipe at the recent reaction to market volatility.

“Last August, after not having one for almost four years, we had  … a perfectly ordinary annual correction,” he said. Yet equity funds and ETFs saw net liquidations spike to “levels not seen since the great panic. … The media began screaming at us, this is it, this is the Big One. … The whole world panicked on a scale it hadn’t done since 2008 and 2009.”

When the market sold off again early this year, the same thing happened—an “existential panic” ensued, he said.

“What that says to me is that this great bull market that started in March 2009 is still younger than anybody thinks it is,” Murray said. “I’ve seen great tops. I saw one in 1968 that basically ended the post-World War II bull market, and I saw one in the year 2000 that basically started … in 1982. What were those tops made of? … This is what great tops are always made of—completely blissed-out euphoria and greed,” or what he compared to the “rapture of the deep” that afflicts scuba divers who lose any sense of danger from nitrogen narcosis.

Great bull markets end when the “knuckle-draggers” are buying all the dips without fear, Murray said. Market tops “are not made out of existential panic from speed bumps.”

Correction: The original version of this article misstated Nick Murray's claim about the number of people with Alzheimer's disease.