TODAY'S CULTURE AND SOCIETY AND IT'S VIEW ON THE ELDERLY

Today's Culture and Society and its View on the Elderly

Today's Culture and Society and its View on the Elderly

Introduction

In the United Kingdom and other developed countries, there is a range of housing alternatives for older adults, ranging from residential living situations for healthy, independent adults to residences for those who may be frail and require assistance. (Increasingly, the term older adults is used when talking about housing alternatives and other services for people who have long been referred to as “retirees,” “senior citizens,” or “the elderly.”)

In the absence of migration, the population of any area will become older when fertility and mortality levels decline. Western industrialized nations have already moved into the phase of pronounced population aging in the face of both fertility declines since the mid 1900s and an increase of almost 30 years in life expectancy during the 20th century. Over the next three decades, the aging of a large post-World War II birth cohort will cause an acceleration of this aging trend. Despite the overwhelming focus on aging in Western societies, the vast majority of the world's older individuals reside in less developed countries outside North America, Europe, and Japan. Rapidly changing political, economic, and social conditions within these areas are likely to result in precipitous shifts toward lower mortality and fertility. With the modernization of these societies and a trend away from reliance on family-based care, the pending demographic tsunami is anticipated to create major problems in providing adequate care for elderly populations as they become frail.

Discussion

Burgeoning elderly populations have led to an increasing concern with understanding how aging people use space and experience place and the manner in which such experience evolves because of changing physical, social, and psychological capabilities associated with advancing years. Older people spend more time at home. Limited mobility leads to progressively more constricted activity spaces. This pattern may be associated with an increasing emphasis on vicarious environmental participation and a growing emotional attachment to easily negotiated and familiar settings including the immediate residence. A desire to preserve independence and age-in-place may be manifested in a geographical centralization of activity within a limited area within the home. Elders may engage in the proactive creation of place by surrounding themselves with treasured artifacts, including photographs that sustain an ongoing sense of home and personal identity. This, in combination with the physical and psychological advantages of environmental familiarity, may result in a reluctance to relocate.

Unfortunately, but amazingly, anecdotes of misuse and neglect lives in early human history. Ancient Greeks accepted that, parricide or killing their parents, it is essential to double-check relentless civilization. Fairy tale full of juvenile persons who take precedence over bad crones who cast bad magic charms (such as Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, lettuce). In colonial times, the United States, a synonym for remedy of aged patients with mental illness. The aged, particularly for mental sickness or dementia, they were compelled to ramble in the ...