Today we spotlight the writing of M.T. Connolly, who is widely recognized as a national expert on elder justice, for which she was honored with a MacArthur “Genius” award. She was the founder of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Elder Justice Initiative and the architect of the Elder Justice Act, the first comprehensive federal law to address the issues of elder abuse and care. The following is an excerpt from her book, The Measure of Our Age – Navigating Care, Safety, Money & Meaning Later in Life
While the book addresses many issues of safety and health for elders, with moving examples of the abuse of elders, it also has wonderful examples of hope and encouragement. She also includes detailed Notes and a comprehensive Bibliography for those who want to dive deeper into the issues. We have chosen to include her commentary on ageism and the meaning of aging, because while we hope our subscribers are not subject to abuse, we are all dealing with the way the world views us as we age.
Lagging Norms
Reverence for elders is central to many cultures. In Confucianism, for example, filial piety is not just about honoring and caring for one’s parents, it is also the philosophical underpinning of a good society. Elders not only pass down crucial facts, they also possess spirituality and wisdom about the greater meaning of things. Experience matters.
In the twentieth-century United states, we take a dimmer view of aging. We’ve invested far more effort to lengthen lives than to assure well-being in the time we’ve gained. Our norms have not kept pace with our longevity. Seen through the lens of history and evolution, today’s longevity struck with lightning speed. Since 1900, humans on average gained more years than since the dawn of the species. At one time, old-old age was exceptional. Now it’s common. When families and communities were more integrated by age, there was a greater role for older adults, ways they could contribute. But when families live apart, older adults become their own social and economic units. Once out of the workforce, they’re deemed to have “outlived” their productivity and value. Their support is on them, sometimes with help from social programs and their families. For many, those added years bring new, bracing challenges that we haven’t figured out how to navigate or finance.
Our attitudes toward aging compound the challenges. We approach it with resistance, fear, and shame, and associate late life with a waning of our humanity. The way we’ve organized our societal institutions leaves most older people outside the flow of civic and domestic life, either isolated or segregated by age. The structural challenges of isolation and segregation are magnified by the cultural ones, like ageism and loneliness, making it harder still to age well.
Antiaging animus, what psychiatrist Robert Butler first called ageism in 1968, is one of the least acknowledged forms of prejudice. Pervasive in American culture, ageism causes untold suffering and has a high price tag. Yale epidemiologist Becca Levy calculates that ageism increases excess health care expenses by $63 billion a year. She also found that ageism turned inward shortens lives. The process starts early. In following people until they turned sixty, Levy found that those who’d “taken in negative stereotypes about aging” at young ages doubled their risk of heart failure, stroke, and heart attack later on. People who held the most positive beliefs about old age lived 7.5 years longer than those with the most negative.
Ageism is also damaging when turned outward. It’s associated with an increased prevalence of violence and entwined with disgust that acts like a social toxin. When we feel disgust for a class of people, that emotion is excreted into our politics and culture, diminishing the humanity of those we find disgusting, and elevating their risk of bias, exclusion and harm. Ageism and disgust also pave the way for elder abuse, neglect and exploitation. Older women suffer the double whammy of ageism and sexism. Not only are they considered to be less beautiful and desirable as they age, but they also become invisible.
Downstream, Upstream
Aging is a little like paddling a boat down a river. To improve the odds of a better old age, it helps to start planning further upstream than we usually do. Looking downstream provides hints about how to do so, and lessons about how things can go wrong. I have an unusual perspective borne of my varied work in law, research, policy, and programs — in trying to push them to better serve the people they’re intended for. My colleagues, my professional “family,” helped give me a fuller picture by letting me see what they saw from their varying perches, through their difference lenses. My work changed how I saw the problems, the solutions, the institutions, and the potential paths for change.
Then at some point, the pyramid in my head flipped. At first my focus was trained on the pyramid’s apex, the worst, most extreme of aspect of aging– elder abuse. But in time I came to see the problem and the cases I worked on more as symptoms of a deeper disease: our denial, fear, and loathing of an entire segment of the human life cycle. The very prevalence of elder abuse, neglect, and exploitation — that it victimizes one in ten people sixty and older and almost half of people with dementia — was a sign. My work, and the stories of friends and strangers, kept reminding me that the problems of aging don’t just afflict “other people.” Aging comes for all of us.
Many of the grimmest troubles can be traced back to our failure to find better solutions to challenges like caregiving, understaffing in facilities, financial exploitation, and isolation. While we wait for better evidence of what kinds of prevention measures work, two things are worth keeping in mind: Older people with good social support are mistreated less often and are better off in other ways too; the stronger the support, the more protective role it plays. And better support for caregivers also can reduce mistreatment. These are important breadcrumbs in our quest to learn what works. We need more. Demographically speaking, our challenges are just beginning. If not addressed, they’ll keep undermining the health and well-being not only of the old but of anyone who loves and cares for them, too. Our policy failures relating to aging are issues that cascade through families, through generations.
Everywhere, everyone is aging. Everywhere, someone loves someone who is growing old. Everywhere, decent people do their best, or want to do their best, with too little help. We can’t stop aging, but we could do so much more to stop the needless suffering that attends it. Some things are simple. Others are hard. But if we bring the same ingenuity, will, and hope we’ve invested in lengthening life to improving it, much is possible: a deeper, more lasting justice.
The author would appreciate any comments or feedback you may have on her book and this topic. You can comment here or check out her website – https://sites.google.com/mtconnolly.com/mtconnolly/home