GERONTOLOGY -The Older Person\'s Personal Perspective Of His\\her Life-course Experience - Essay Example

• Chosen Older Person

I will call our seasoned lady Mrs. Y, a 78 year old woman who has been widowed for 2 years and has never gotten over her anguish. In the past 2 months, she has become more depressed when a good friend of her has moved to another community. She is losing weight and grumble of not sleeping soundly as well as not being able to recall things as she used to. Her granddaughter has felt that Mrs. Y was depressed and that therapy might help because she herself had a good experience with at the state university. However, Mrs Y is very unsure about what the therapist can do for her. The waiting room reminds her of a doctor’s office, and she thinks that perhaps she will get medication or the same kind of friendly but firm advice that her family physician who died 10 years ago used to provide. Actually, she is so worried the psychologist will evaluate her and put her in a psychiatric hospital. When Mrs. Y wavers a little as she stand up from the waiting room couch, the doctor unexpectedly and somewhat awkwardly grabs her to steady her, which annoys Mrs. Y and makes her feel more unbalanced for a second.

Once in the therapy room, Mrs. Y has trouble understanding the doctor who tends to speak rather softly and with an accent that marks him as being from out of state. At times Mrs. Y guesses what is being asked and is not sure how the answers are being taken because she cannot see the therapist’s face very well. The room is dimly lit, and Mrs. Y has not replaced her glasses in 5 years because of the expense. After an hour, Mrs. Y has become increasingly more anxious with the strong feeling that the doctor thinks she is crazy. Throughout the next 3 months, she worries about whether she will be able to pay for the doctor’s bill since no one told her that her Medicare would cover the fee. When no bill arrives, she deduced that the doctor saw her as a charity case and feels even more disheartened. Her granddaughter encouraged her to visit another therapist, but Mrs. Y declines and surreptitiously feels thankful that she was not sent to the elderly unit of a neighbouring private psychiatric hospital.

• Physiological and Biological Ageing

The terms ageing or senescence, which is often used interchangeably, involves decline and deterioration. Therefore, the growth of children over their initial years is thought as a development rather than ageing, since the changes are advantageous rather than detrimental. Although the result of senescent deterioration is in the death of the individual organism, not all ‘cell death’ is destructive to the organism as a whole. In fact, it may be ‘programmed’ as part of the organisms’ biological economy. The ageing processes have been defined as those which make individuals more vulnerable as they grow older to the an assortment of factors, intrinsic or extrinsic which may cause death. Death may arise from a decline in the individual organism’s facility to sustain its intrinsic function in the face of physiological stress from an extrinsic source such as accident or disease1.