Here they are …. hope you enjoy them …

https://almage.home.blog/member-pictures/

On­line gen­er­a­tion gap in Que­bec nar­row­ing, study sug­gests

Stream­ing, so­cial me­dia, and shop­ping still more pop­u­lar among younger peo­ple

• Montreal Gazette, Canada
• Aug 23, 2019
• Page: A2

JOHN MA­HONEY A new sur­vey finds 96 per cent of peo­ple in Que­bec age 18 to 24 are on the in­ter­net at least once a day while 61 per cent of those over age 65 in the prov­ince went on­line daily.

Que­bec’s gen­er­a­tion gap when it comes to in­ter­net use is nar­row­ing as an older au­di­ence em­braces the web, ac­cord­ing to a sur­vey by the Cen­tre fa­cil­i­tant la recherche et l’in­no­va­tion dans les or­ga­ni­za­tions (CEFRIO), an or­ga­ni­za­tion that works to pro­mote dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy in the prov­ince.

In­ter­net use in Que­bec still varies from one gen­er­a­tion to an­other, but an ex­am­i­na­tion of that use in 2018 by CEFRIO found the de­mo­graphic split be­tween those who reg­u­larly ac­cess on­line tech­nol­ogy and those who do not is now man­i­fested around the age of 55, 10 years older than was the case sev­eral years ago.

CEFRIO’s study, ti­tled NETen­dances 2018 and made pub­lic on Thurs­day, found that 96 per cent of users age 18-24 were on the in­ter­net at least once a day, a pro­por­tion that dropped to only 95 per cent for those age 25 to 34.

Mean­while, 61 per cent of users age 65 and over were on the in­ter­net at least once a day.

A to­tal of 97 per cent of users age 18 to 24 said they own a smart­phone, al­though that same de­mo­graphic group had the low­est pro­por­tion of elec­tronic tablet own­ers.

Tablets were found to be most pop­u­lar with users age 35-54, with 63 per cent of that age group say­ing they own one.

Smart watches were owned by only 10 per cent of users in any de­mo­graphic.

CEFRIO noted that 77 per cent of adults age 18 to 24 sub­scribed in 2018 to an on­line stream­ing ser­vice pro­vid­ing them with movies and shows. That pro­por­tion dropped to 65 per cent for those age 25-34, 50 per cent for the 35-54 de­mo­graphic, 44 per cent for users age 55-64 and 31 per for those age 65 and over.

The use of so­cial me­dia by all age groups younger than 65 var­ied from 78 per cent to 98 per cent, and the pro­por­tion was 49 per cent for those age 65 and older.

YouTube was the pre­ferred so­cial me­dia plat­form for those age 18-34 while Face­book was the net­work most used by those 35 and older. In­sta­gram and Snapchat were most pop­u­lar with users age 18 to 24.

On­line shop­ping at least once a year was far more pop­u­lar with users age 18 to 54 (vary­ing from 73 to 81 per cent de­pend­ing on the de­mo­graphic group) than with those age 55-64 (47 per cent) and 65 and older (30 per cent).

Cloth­ing, shoes, jew­els and ac­ces­sories were the most com­mon on­line pur­chases made by all age groups.

While 55 per cent of all re­spon­dents said they have a pos­i­tive view of smart tech­nol­ogy and hard­ware, that en­thu­si­asm waned for those age 55-64 (43 per cent) and over 65 (40 per cent).

Mean­while, 83 per cent of those age 18-24 had a pos­i­tive view of the role of dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy in their daily lives.

Man be­hind Alzheimer’s fund hopes to inspire

• Montreal Gazette, Canada
• Aug 21, 2019
• Page: A3

DAVE SID­AWAY An­drew Harper, 96, cre­ated a $500,000 en­dow­ment fund to help fi­nance the op­er­at­ing costs of a new ac­tiv­ity cen­tre at the Alzheimer So­ci­ety of Mon­treal. The or­ga­ni­za­tion will hon­our Harper on Aug. 27.

My father in­spired me to be a giver. He used to say, ‘If you help some­body in need, you will see that God will take care of you.’

An­drew Harper’s father, Si­mon, lived to be nearly 99 years old. For most of that time, he had what An­drew de­scribed as a “bril­liant mind.” But he de­vel­oped de­men­tia and be­came un­moored, slowly but in­ex­orably, from daily life in a de­cline that has been called the long good­bye.

“It was not easy,” re­called An­drew, a re­tired Mon­treal busi­ness­man who will soon cel­e­brate his 97th birth­day.

With his father in mind, he has cre­ated a $500,000 en­dow­ment fund at the Alzheimer So­ci­ety of Mon­treal in his name and that of his beloved wife, who died in 2015. The An­drew and Ca­role Harper Alzheimer So­ci­ety of Mon­treal En­dow­ment Fund will be launched next Tues­day at the or­ga­ni­za­tion’s St-Henri head­quar­ters and a plaque un­veiled to hon­our and thank the cou­ple.

An­other goal of the Aug. 27 event is to raise aware­ness of the work of the Alzheimer So­ci­ety of Mon­treal and to en­cour­age other donors to step for­ward, said ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor Camille Isaacs-Morell.

The num­ber of peo­ple liv­ing with de­men­tia is in­creas­ing steadily and it is es­ti­mated that by 2031 more than 50,000 Mon­treal­ers will be liv­ing with Alzheimer’s dis­ease or a re­lated dis­or­der — an in­crease of 66 per cent from 2016, she said. Al­ready there has been a sharp in­crease in the de­mand for ed­u­ca­tion ser­vices and train­ing for care­givers and oth­ers who work in CLSCs and res­i­dences look­ing af­ter peo­ple with de­men­tia, she said, and the or­ga­ni­za­tion hopes to nearly dou­ble the num­ber of clients it serves to 3,500 within five years.

With the largest net­work of com­mu­nity-based ser­vices on the is­land, the Alzheimer So­ci­ety of Mon­treal has part­ner­ships with more than 50 com­mu­nity or­ga­ni­za­tions and in 19 ser­vice points of­fers respite, stim­u­lat­ing ac­tiv­i­ties, coun­selling ser­vices, in­for­ma­tion and sup­port groups, con­fer­ences and more.

This year’s op­er­at­ing bud­get is $2.3 mil­lion, of which $750,000 comes from the gov­ern­ment, $850,000 from ma­jor do­na­tions and di­rect-mail cam­paigns, $540,000 from ma­jor fundrais­ing events and third-party ac­tiv­i­ties and about $100,000 from other pro­grams. Although in­di­vid­ual do­na­tions are ap­pre­ci­ated, the or­ga­ni­za­tion is “look­ing to establish part­ner­ships and have re­cur­ring do­na­tions” to re­duce its heavy de­pen­dence on gov­ern­ment sub­si­dies, said Isaacs-Morell.

The Harper en­dow­ment fund will help sup­port the op­er­at­ing bud­get of a planned ac­tiv­ity cen­tre in the or­ga­ni­za­tion’s Notre-Dame St. W. build­ing that will ac­com­mo­date 20 to 40 peo­ple daily, four or five days a week.

Said An­drew Harper of the gift: “I like to think that my wife will some­how know it and ap­prove.” The Harpers were long­time con­trib­u­tors to the Alzheimer So­ci­ety of Mon­treal and Ca­role helped to plan the or­ga­ni­za­tion’s an­nual fundrais­ing ball.

In keep­ing with his wife’s “gen­er­ous ways,” he de­cided he wanted do more to help the broader com­mu­nity. “I feel that what­ever I am do­ing should be an ex­am­ple to oth­ers to fol­low in my foot­steps,” he said in a re­cent in­ter­view in his apart­ment.

He was also philo­soph­i­cal: “I can’t take it with me.”

His $500,000 gift to the Alzheimer So­ci­ety of Mon­treal is be­ing made through the An­drew and Ca­role Harper Tol­er­ance Fund set up at the Jewish Com­mu­nity Foun­da­tion. It fol­lows a $1 mil­lion do­na­tion in 2018 to Chez Doris, a day cen­tre in down­town Mon­treal that helps dis­ad­van­taged women, and an ear­lier $1.2 mil­lion do­na­tion to the MADA Com­mu­nity Cen­tre for im­prove­ments to its Dé­carie Blvd. build­ing that in­cluded an el­e­va­tor, a ramp for strollers and wheel­chairs, new en­trance doors and an ex­panded lobby.

Harper, who is Jewish, left his na­tive Bucharest with his brother in 1940 af­ter the Nazis oc­cu­pied Ro­ma­nia and they ended up in Ha­vana, where their par­ents joined them. He stud­ied at univer­sity there and then in Mi­ami, where he was drafted into the United States Army Air Force and worked in the counter-in­tel­li­gence corps.

Af­ter leav­ing the army, Harper earned a de­gree in busi­ness ad­min­is­tra­tion from Columbia Univer­sity, re­turned to Ha­vana for grad­u­ate work and then worked for the DuPont com­pany, head­quar­tered in Wilm­ing­ton, Del. A friend in­tro­duced him to Ca­role Hymes, a New York City na­tive, and the two mar­ried in 1954. They moved to Mon­treal, where Ca­role helped him open a busi­ness im­port­ing fine foods, choco­lates and bis­cuits. They re­tired about 30 years ago and lived hap­pily to­gether un­til Ca­role’s death.

Th­ese days, Harper en­joys chess, works out twice weekly with a trainer and reg­u­larly dines out with friends. And he re­mem­bers his father’s ex­am­ple.

“Some peo­ple are tak­ers and oth­ers are givers,” he said. “My father in­spired me to be a giver. He used to say, ‘If you help some­body in need, you will see that God will take care of you.’ ”

Learn more at www.alzheimer­mon­treal.ca.

CBC Docs POV – Never Too Old : Olive Bryanton, 81, is working hard to get a PhD and help change the world for older women in Canada: “a little old lady, I am not!”

From: CBC POV Docs ..

https://cbcgem.app/wE4o

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614155/old-age-is-made-upand-this-concept-is-hurting-everyone/

Old age” is made up—and this concept is hurting everyone.
Products designed for older people reinforce a bogus image of them as passive and feeble.
by Joseph F. Coughlin, Aug 21, 2019
Illustration of senior with products targeted to seniors – GEORGE WYLESOL

Of all the wrenching changes humanity knows it will face in the next few decades—climate change, the rise of AI, the gene-editing revolution—none is nearly as predictable in its effects as global aging. Life expectancy in industrialized economies has gained more than 30 years since 1900, and for the first time in human history there are now more people over 65 than under 5—all thanks to a combination of increasing longevity, diminished fertility, and an aging Baby Boom cohort. We’ve watched these trends develop for generations; demographers can chart them decades in advance.
And yet we’re utterly unprepared for the consequences.

We are unprepared economically, socially, institutionally, and technologically. A wide swath of employers in the US—in both industry and government—are experiencing what has been called a retirement brain drain, as experienced workers depart crucial roles. At the same time, unemployed older workers struggle to find good jobs despite unemployment rates now at a 50-year nadir. Half of older longtime job holders, meanwhile, are pushed out of their jobs before they planned to retire. Half of Americans are financially unprepared for retirement—25% say they plan to never stop working—and state pension systems are hardly better off. Public transportation systems, to the limited extent they even exist outside of major cities, are unequal to the task of ferrying a large, older, non-driving population to where it needs to go. The US also faces a shortage of professional elder-care providers that only stands to worsen as demand increases, and in the meantime, “informal” elder care already extracts an annual economic toll of $522 billion per year in opportunity cost—mainly from women reducing their work hours, or leaving jobs altogether, to take care of aging parents.

And yet these problems might turn out to be surprisingly tractable. It’s strange, for instance, that employers are facing a retirement crisis at the same time that many older workers have to fight outright ageism to prove their value—sort of like a forest fire coexisting with a torrential downpour. For that matter, it’s strange that we, as a society, put obstacles in the way of older job seekers given that hiring them could help prevent programs like Social Security and Medicare from running out of money.

The MIT AgeLab, which I head, has homed in on one such paradox in particular: the profound mismatch between products built for older people and the products they actually want. To give just a few examples, only 20% of people who could benefit from hearing aids seek them out. Just 2% of those over 65 seek out personal emergency response technologies—the sorts of wearable devices that can call 911 with the push of a button—and many (perhaps even most) of those who do have them refuse to press the call button even after suffering a serious fall. History gives us many examples of such failed products, from age-friendly cars to blended foods to oversize cell phones.

In every example, product designers thought they understood the demands of the older market, but underestimated how older consumers would flee any product giving off a whiff of “oldness.” After all, there can be no doubt that personal emergency response pendants are for “old people,” and as Pew has reported, only 35% of people 75 or older consider themselves “old.”

Asking young designers to merely step into the shoes of older consumers (and we at the MIT AgeLab have literally developed a physiological aging simulation suit for that purpose) is a good start, but it may not be enough to give them true insight into the desires of older consumers.

There’s an expectations gap between what older consumers want from a product and what most of these products deliver, and it’s no frivolous matter. If you need a hearing aid but no one can make one that you think is worth buying, that will have serious ramifications for your quality of life, and may lead to social isolation and physical danger down the road.

But the expectations gap is also—here’s that word again—strange. Why do products built for older people so often seem so uninspiring—big, beige, and boring? It’s not that older people don’t have money. The 50-plus population controls 83% of household wealth in the US and spent more in 2015 than those younger than 50: nearly $8 trillion of economic activity, if you include downstream effects. Granted, that wealth is unequally distributed, but if better products existed, you’d expect to see them snapped up by the people with more money, and that hasn’t happened (with a handful of very recent exceptions I’ll discuss).

And don’t try to tell me the real issue is that older people aren’t tech savvy. Maybe that stereotype once contained a grain of truth—in 2000, just 14% of 65-plus America used the internet—but it’s no longer the case. Today, 73% of the 65-plus population is online, and half own smartphones.

The expectations gap, then, is the sort of vacuum one would expect nature not to tolerate. If you believe that markets, given enough demand, tend to solve problems sooner or later, the gap’s persistence is uncanny: like a Volkswagen-size boulder hovering six inches off the ground.

Don’t worry; there is a natural explanation—and it holds clues for how we can turn many paradoxical problems of global aging into opportunities.

The “golden years” hoax
The root cause of all this daylight—between products and consumer expectations, between employer and older worker, between what 75-year-olds think of as “old” and their self-conception—is disarmingly simple. “Old age,” as we know it, is made up.

To be sure, a full Whitman’s Sampler of unpleasant biological contingencies can arrive with age, and death ultimately comes for us all. But the difference between those hard truths and the dominant narrative of old age that we’ve inherited is big enough and persistent enough to account for the expectations gap—and then some.

Two hundred years ago, no one thought of “the aged” or “the old” as a population-size problem to be solved. But that changed thanks to a confluence of since-debunked science and frenzied institution-building. In the first half of the 19th century, doctors, especially in the US and UK, believed that biological old age occurred when the body ran out of a substance known as “vital energy,” which, like energy in a battery, was consumed over the course of a lifetime of physical activity, never to be replenished. When patients began to display key signs of old age (white hair, menopause), the only medically sound response was to insist they cut back on all activities. “If death resulted from an exhausted supply of energy, then the goal was to retain it at all cost,” historian Carole Haber wrote in her 1994 book Old Age and the Search for Security, “by eating the correct foods, wearing the proper clothes, and performing (or refraining from) certain activities.” Sex and manual labor were both considered to be especially draining.

By the 1860s, modern notions of pathology had begun to replace vital energy in continental Europe, and they eventually found their way to the US and UK. In the meantime, however, social and economic developments were taking place that would preserve as though in amber the conception of old age as a period of passive rest.

In the increasingly mechanized workplace, efficiency was the new watchword, and by the turn of the century, experts were clambering out of the drywall in offices and factories everywhere, offering to wring extra productivity out of workers. The older worker, low on vital energy, was an easy target. As one efficiency expert, Harrington Emerson, argued in 1909, when a company retired its oldest workers, it produced “a desirable wriggle of life all the way down the line.” Private pensions—which were first introduced by the American Express company in 1875 and exploded in the decades that followed—were one natural response. They were issued in some cases out of genuine humanitarian concern for unwillingly retired employees, but also because they gave managers the moral cover they needed to fire workers merely for the crime of superannuation.

By the 1910s, it was conventional wisdom that oldness constituted a problem worthy of action on a mass scale. Between 1909 and 1915, the country saw its first federal–level pension bill, state-level universal pension, and public commission on aging, as well as a major survey investigating the economic condition of older adults. In medicine, the term “geriatrics” was coined in 1909; by 1914, the first textbook on that specialty was published. Perhaps the best representation of the tenor of the time was a 1911 film by the important (and notoriously racist) filmmaker D. W. Griffith, which told the story of an aging carpenter falling into penury after losing his job to a younger man. Its title was What Shall We Do With Our Old?

By the start of World War I, the first half of our modern narrative of old age was written: older people constituted a population in dire need of assistance. It wasn’t until after World War II that the second half arrived in the form of the “golden years,” a stroke of marketing genius by Del Webb, developer of the Arizona retirement mecca Sun City. The golden years positioned retirement not just as something bad your boss did to you, but rather as a period of reward for a lifetime of hard work. As retirement became synonymous with leisure, the full 20th-century conception of oldness took form: if you weren’t the kind of older person who was needy—for money, for help with everyday tasks, for medical attention—then you must be the kind who was greedy: for easy living and consumerist luxuries.

With both wants and needs spoken for, this Janus-faced picture gave the impression of comprehensiveness, but in fact it pigeonholed older people. To be old meant to be always a taker, never a giver; always an economic consumer, never a producer.

Why products create stereotypes
One of the more conspicuous ways the constructed narrative of old age exerts itself today is in products built for older people, which tend to fall to either side of the needy/greedy dialectic: walkers, medications, and pill-reminder apps on one hand, and cruise ships, booze, and golfing green fees on the other.

There’s more to life than the stuff you buy, of course. And yet, there is good reason to believe that the key to a better, longer, more sustainable old age may just lie in better products, especially if we define “product” broadly: as everything a society builds for people, from electronic doodads to foods to transportation infrastructure.

Consider the text message. Originally billed as the province of gossiping teenagers, it’s been a godsend for deaf people. Transcendent design, as we at the AgeLab call such developments, offers a solution that’s larger than the baseline needs of older people, but still includes their needs. The electric garage-door opener is another example: originally designed as a mechanical aid for those incapable of lifting heavy wooden doors, it offered convenience too attractive to ignore, and found its way into general use.

The nascent field of “hearables”—earbuds capable of such tasks as real-time translation and augmenting certain environmental sounds—may finally destigmatize assistive hearing devices. Sharing-economy services, meanwhile, offer services à la carte that were previously obtainable only as a bundle in assisted-living settings. When you can summon grocery deliveries, help around the house, and rides on demand from your phone, you might even delay a move to a more institutional setting—especially since it might save you a lot of money along the way. Some 87% of people over 65 say they’d prefer to “age in place” in their own homes.

But for the purposes of rewriting narratives, even more important than what products do is what they say. I could write a hundred op-eds extolling the virtues of older people, but any positive effect they have on public perception would be far outweighed by a single infantilizing product on store shelves. When a company builds something that treats older people as a problem to be solved, everyone gets the message immediately, without even having to think about it.

Products have perpetuated the reductive narrative of old age in a vicious cycle that has lasted decades. It works something like this: The entire product economy surrounding old age reinforces an image in the public’s mind of old people as passive consumers. Then, when an older adult applies for a job, she must fight this ambient sense—call it ageism if you like—that she, a consumer by nature, doesn’t belong in a production role. As a result, her hard-won experiences rarely find their way into design decisions for new, cutting-edge products—especially the high-tech ones likely to shape how we’ll live tomorrow. And so, without such insight to guide them, the few designers who deign to innovate for older people turn, without realizing it, to the ambient narrative, ultimately churning out the same old reductive products. And so the cycle perpetuates itself.

How to fix our thinking
I’m hardly the first academic to note that the free market can cast what amounts to a distorting field over reality, but in this rare case it may be possible to harness the energy of that market and aim it squarely at our old-age myths. After all, the expectations gap wants to be closed—that hovering boulder wants to crash to the ground—for the simple reason that companies stand to make more money by better serving the truly massive older market.

Such a development won’t solve every problem associated with aging, of course. Income inequality and racial inequities both intersect with aging in troubling ways. Wealthier and whiter Americans are more likely to be better financially prepared for retirement, as well as to be healthier and live longer. Fixing how we think about older people isn’t going to solve those inequities, but it may at least make the premature firing of older people less common, and help them find better-paying jobs.

It works something like this: The entire product economy surrounding old age reinforces an image in the public’s mind of old people as passive consumers. Then, when an older adult applies for a job, she must fight this ambient sense—call it ageism if you like—that she, a consumer by nature, doesn’t belong in a production role.

It also won’t solve the epidemic of suicides, or “deaths of despair,” plaguing middle-aged Americans. But on the other hand, redefining “old age” from a black hole of passivity to a period marked by activity, agency, and even renewal surely couldn’t hurt the view from middle age. When you’re talking about changing the very meaning of the final third (or more) of adult life, it’s impossible to predict all the effects that will spider-web out through earlier stages. Perhaps the promise of a brighter future won’t matter much to people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s—but it certainly won’t make matters worse. In fact, I wonder if a new, more realistic image of old age might motivate younger and midcareer workers to save more for the future, and lead them to demand better retirement benefits from employers. For the first time, they may find themselves saving not for some hypothetical older person, but rather for a better version of themselves.

Technologists, particularly those who make consumer products, will have a strong influence over how we’ll live tomorrow. By treating older adults not as an ancillary market but as a core constituency, the tech sector can do much of the work required to redefine old age. But tech workplaces also skew infamously young. Asking young designers to merely step into the shoes of older consumers (and we at the MIT AgeLab have literally developed a physiological aging simulation suit for that purpose) is a good start, but it is not enough to give them true insight into the desires of older consumers. Luckily there’s a simpler route: hire older workers.

In fact, what’s true in tech goes for workplaces writ large. The next time you’re hiring and an older worker’s résumé crosses your desk, give it a serious look. After all, someday you’ll be older too. So strike a blow for your future self.

Global aging may be inevitable, but old age, as we know it, is not. It’s something we’ve made up. Now it’s up to us to remake it.

Joseph F. Coughlin (@josephcoughlin on Twitter) is the director of the MIT AgeLab and author of The Longevity Economy.

I read this letter and wanted to pass it along ..,

Dear Therapist: My Friend Is Dying and Has Asked Me Not to Contact Her
I want to respect her wishes, but I feel hurt and confused by her request.

From The Atlantic, Aug/2019
https://apple.news/A00IwqrZLQWifyWtTT_6VPA

In­creased at­ten­tion should be paid to help­ing se­niors cope with stres­sors, Heather Her­riot writes.

• Montreal Gazette, Canada
• Aug 16, 2019

BRIAN THOMP­SON/FILES De­pres­sion among se­niors is of­ten mis­taken for phys­i­cal or cog­ni­tive de­cline, says Heather Her­riot.

We may be liv­ing longer than ever thanks to med­i­cal ad­vances, but when it comes to se­niors’ men­tal health, far too lit­tle at­ten­tion is be­ing paid.

Grow­ing older can be ac­com­pa­nied by stres­sors that can trig­ger men­tal health is­sues. Chronic med­i­cal con­di­tions, in­clud­ing chronic pain, as well as a gen­eral de­cline in func­tion­ing, can make it harder to per­form daily tasks like house­work or per­sonal care and give rise to neg­a­tive emo­tions. Mo­bil­ity is­sues — and in the win­ter, icy side­walks — can make it harder for se­niors to get out. Lone­li­ness is a prob­lem for some as iso­la­tion in­creases and so­cial net­works shrink. Some peo­ple feel re­grets about events in their pasts.

Re­search has shown that de­pressed older adults tend to have more phys­i­cal health prob­lems and shorter life­spans. Im­prov­ing se­niors’ men­tal health can mean health­ier and longer lives for our se­niors. But there are many bar­ri­ers that make seek­ing and re­ceiv­ing the proper help a chal­lenge.

While the stigma around men­tal health is­sues is de­clin­ing among younger gen­er­a­tions, mem­bers of older gen­er­a­tions are less likely to have aban­doned past attitudes, and thus can be re­luc­tant to seek help.

This of­ten leaves the bur­den of iden­ti­fy­ing men­tal ill­ness on fam­ily mem­bers or pri­mary care pro­fes­sion­als. How­ever, many of the signs and symp­toms of de­pres­sion or other men­tal health is­sues can of­ten be mis­taken for other phys­i­cal or cog­ni­tive dis­or­ders. These is­sues and the lack of com­mu­nity and pro­fes­sional re­sources ded­i­cated to help­ing se­niors’ men­tal health leave nu­mer­ous peo­ple at risk.

There are many ways to im­prove the men­tal health of our rapidly ag­ing pop­u­la­tion. Health-care prac­ti­tion­ers who work with se­niors should be trained to iden­tify those who seem to be strug­gling with men­tal health is­sues or over­whelm­ing stress, and to pro­vide re­sources or sup­port to pro­mote healthy cop­ing.

Re­gret­tably, the stres­sors com­mon in old age are largely un­con­trol­lable. This has led the Per­son­al­ity, Ag­ing & Health Lab at Con­cor­dia Univer­sity to fo­cus on ap­proaches that take that re­al­ity into ac­count.

We have found that the cop­ing strate­gies older adults use to feel bet­ter may need to shift from what has worked best in our younger years. This means in­stead of us­ing a lot of ef­fort and en­ergy to cope with a stres­sor, it may be bet­ter to fo­cus on con­serv­ing en­ergy and on deal­ing with our emo­tions.

My PhD re­search has found that be­ing kind to your­self, also known as self-com­pas­sion, is one way to re­duce the harm­ful ef­fects of stress and im­prove qual­ity of life in older adult­hood. I looked at more than 250 older adults liv­ing in the Mon­treal area and found that among those who were stressed-out, self-com­pas­sion pro­tected them from ex­pe­ri­enc­ing some of the neg­a­tive bi­o­log­i­cal ef­fects of stress, such as higher cor­ti­sol lev­els.

While the con­cept of self-es­teem is well-known, self-com­pas­sion is the lesser known but ar­guably more im­por­tant and adap­tive way of re­lat­ing to one­self. To be self-com­pas­sion­ate means to treat your­self in the same way you would treat your close friends or loved ones.

In­stead of be­ing crit­i­cal or judg­men­tal when some­thing goes wrong, like when arthri­tis causes you to drop a plate on the floor, it in­stead means be­ing able to ac­cept what hap­pened and not ru­mi­nate ex­ces­sively. It also can mean rec­og­niz­ing that what hap­pened to you also hap­pens to many oth­ers go­ing through the chal­lenges of ag­ing.

As longevity in­creases, along with the num­ber and pro­por­tion of se­niors in our so­ci­ety, it will be all the more im­por­tant to em­pha­size pro­long­ing qual­ity of life in these later years. This means draw­ing at­ten­tion to se­niors’ men­tal health and to the cop­ing strate­gies most ben­e­fi­cial to this rapidly grow­ing pop­u­la­tion. Heather Her­riot is a Pub­lic Scholar and PhD can­di­date in psy­chol­ogy at Con­cor­dia Univer­sity. Her re­search fo­cuses on path­ways to suc­cess­ful ag­ing.

The Saint Anne Pics are online at:
https://almage.home.blog/saint-anne-de-bellevue-outing/

Enjoy !

WHAT TO DO WITH THE IN­CREAS­ING NUM­BER WHO FEEL ALONE IN A
CON­NECTED AGE?

• Montreal Gazette, Canada
• Aug 10, 2019
• by: SHARON KIRKEY

The vol­un­teers at the University of Chicago’s Brain Dy­nam­ics Lab­o­ra­tory, all oth­er­wise young and healthy, were tied to­gether by re­ally only one thing: nearly off-the-chart scores on the most widely used scale mea­sur­ing lone­li­ness.

Asked how of­ten they felt they had no one they could turn to, how of­ten they felt their re­la­tion­ships seemed su­per­fi­cial and forced, how of­ten they felt alone, left out, iso­lated or no longer closer to any­one, the an­swer, al­most al­ways, was “al­ways.”

The vol­un­teers agreed to be ran­domly dosed over eight weeks with ei­ther preg­nenolone, a hor­mone nat­u­rally pro­duced

by the body’s adrenal gland, or a placebo. Two hours af­ter swal­low­ing the as­signed tablet, the university’s re­searchers cap­tured and recorded their brain ac­tiv­ity while the par­tic­i­pants looked at pictures of emo­tional faces or neu­tral scenes.

Stud­ies in an­i­mals sug­gest that a sin­gle in­jec­tion of preg­nenolone can re­duce or “nor­mal­ize” an ex­ag­ger­ated threat re­sponse in so­cially iso­lated lab mice, sim­i­lar to the kind of hy­per vig­i­lance lonely peo­ple feel that makes them poor at read­ing other peo­ple’s in­ten­tions and feel­ings.

The re­searchers have ev­ery hope the drug will work in lonely hu­man brains, too, al­though they in­sist the goal is not an at­tempt to cure lone­li­ness with a pill.

Lead re­searcher and neu­ro­sci­en­tist Stephanie Ca­cioppo has likened us­ing a drug to rub­bing frost from a wind­shield. Lone­li­ness in­creases both a de­sire to con­nect with oth­ers, and a gut in­stinct for self-preser­va­tion (“if I let you get close to me, you’ll only hurt me, too”).

Feel­ings of lone­li­ness are not new. But so­ci­etal changes, like the in­ter­net, have less­ened the need to phys­i­cally meet.

Peo­ple be­come more wary, cau­tious and self-cen­tred. The idea is to help peo­ple see things as they are, “rather than be­ing afraid of ev­ery­one,” Ca­cioppo said in an in­ter­view with Smith­so­nian. com.

For some, the idea of a phar­ma­co­log­i­cal buf­fer against lone­li­ness is just an­other sign of the creep­ing med­i­cal­iza­tion of ev­ery­day hu­man woes: Wouldn’t a pill for lone­li­ness only make us more in­dif­fer­ent, more dis­con­nected? Is it re­ally the best we can do to fix the mod­ern world’s so-called epi­demic of lone­li­ness?

Head­lines sug­gest we’ve be­come con­sumed by lone­li­ness, a new gen­er­a­tion of Eleanor Rig­bys half a cen­tury af­ter the Bea­tles lament for the lonely: Why are 30some­things lonely? What You Need to Know about the Lone­li­ness Epi­demic. Lone­li­ness is a hu­man catas­tro­phe.

A re­cent An­gus Reid In­sti­tute sur­vey found that nearly half of Cana­di­ans some­times or of­ten feel alone. In the U.S., the num­ber of Amer­i­cans who feel they have no one with whom they can speak to has tripled since 1985.

“God, but life is lone­li­ness, de­spite all the opi­ates, de­spite the shrill tin­sel gai­ety of ‘par­ties’ with no pur­pose, de­spite the false grin­ning faces we all wear,” Sylvia Plath wrote in jour­nals pub­lished nearly four decades ago. To­day, peo­ple across the West are reporting higher lev­els of per­sis­tent lone­li­ness than ever be­fore.

But is the epi­demic real? Are we truly more lone­some than gen­er­a­tions past, or have we sim­ply lost the ca­pac­ity, the tol­er­ance, to be alone? Are the dig­i­tal technologies that en­able us to have in­stant con­tact and faux friend­ships dis­tanc­ing us from mean­ing­ful ones? Is it fair to pin the blame on our dig­i­tal cul­ture, or is the course of western pol­i­tics, the rise of pop­ulism and in­di­vid­u­al­ism re­ally the cause?

To those test­ing the lone­li­ness pill, a “ther­a­peu­tic” lit­tle helper, the epi­demic is cer­tainly real.

“Imag­ine a con­di­tion that makes a per­son ir­ri­ta­ble, de­pressed and self-cen­tred, and is as­so­ci­ated with a 26 per cent in­crease in the risk of pre­ma­ture mor­tal­ity,” Ca­cioppo and her late hus­band, John Ca­cioppo, wrote in The Lancet last year. Around a third of peo­ple in in­dus­tri­al­ized coun­tries re­port feel­ing lonely, one in 12 se­verely so, and the pro­por­tions are in­creas­ing, they warned.

The An­gus Reid study, con­ducted in part­ner­ship with the faith-based think tank Car­dus, found that four in 10 Cana­di­ans sur­veyed said they of­ten or some­times wished they had some­one to talk to, but don’t. One quar­ter said they would rather have less time alone, led by 18- to 34-year-olds. Women un­der 35 ex­pressed more feel­ings of lone­li­ness than any other age group.

In a poll of 20,000 Amer­i­cans last year, nearly half said they lack com­pan­ion­ship or mean­ing­ful re­la­tion­ships. One in four Amer­i­cans rarely or never feel as though there are peo­ple who re­ally un­der­stand them. Six in 10 Bri­tons re­cently told poll­sters their pet is their clos­est com­pan­ion.

“Nearly 300 mil­lion Amer­i­cans live alone, many not out of pref­er­ence,” said Christophe Lane, author of Shy­ness: How Nor­mal Be­hav­ior Be­came a Sick­ness. In Canada, the per­cent­age of one-per­son house­holds has quadru­pled over the past three gen­er­a­tions in Canada to 28 per cent in 2016, from seven per cent in 1951.

Life ex­pectancy is grow­ing, fer­til­ity rates are fall­ing and the pop­u­la­tion is ag­ing. We’re mar­ry­ing later and hav­ing fewer chil­dren, if any at all. Tech­nol­ogy means we can do al­most all we need to do from home with­out phys­i­cally in­ter­act­ing with a sin­gle hu­man soul, and a chronic lack of con­nect­ed­ness, of be­ing on the so­cial pe­riph­ery, can be se­ri­ously harm­ful, even deadly.

Stud­ies sug­gest lone­li­ness is more detri­men­tal to health than obe­sity, phys­i­cal ac­tiv­ity or pol­luted air. Chronic lone­li­ness, and not the tran­sient kind that comes with a sig­nif­i­cant life dis­rup­tion, such as mov­ing cities for work, or the death of a part­ner, has been linked with an in­creased risk of de­vel­op­ing or dy­ing from coro­nary artery dis­ease, stroke, el­e­vated blood pres­sure, de­men­tia and de­pressed im­mu­nity.

A study pub­lished in May found lonely peo­ple have shorter telom­eres, which are found at the end of chro­mo­somes, like the tip of a shoelace. Telom­eres get shorter ev­ery time a cell di­vides, and shorter telom­eres are con­sid­ered a sign of ac­cel­er­ated ag­ing. Lone­li­ness and iso­la­tion have been linked to men­tal health prob­lems — de­pres­sion and anx­i­ety — even in other so­cial species, like rats.

Lone­li­ness has also been blamed for help­ing fuel the opi­oid cri­sis, po­lit­i­cal up­heaval and lone shoot­ers. Lonely peo­ple “turn to an­gry pol­i­tics” when they have a void to fill, Arthur Brooks, pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can En­ter­prise In­sti­tute, wrote in the New York Times. The man ac­cused of killing 22 peo­ple at a pop­u­lar Wal­mart store in El Paso, Texas, last week­end was an “ex­treme loner,” the Los An­ge­les Times re­ported.

Still, lone­li­ness, in and of it­self, isn’t a dis­ease, but a feel­ing, a dis­crep­ancy, as the Ca­ciop­pos have de­scribed it, be­tween our “pre­ferred and ac­tual so­cial re­la­tion­ships.” Feel­ing alone isn’t the same as be­ing alone. And be­ing alone doesn’t mean feel­ing alone. Peo­ple can feel lonely in a crowd, cou­pled or un­cou­pled.

“Lone­li­ness is a con­scious, cog­ni­tive feel­ing of es­trange­ment or so­cial sep­a­ra­tion; an emo­tional lack that con­cerns a per­son’s place in the world,” cul­tural his­to­rian Dr. Fay Bound Al­berti wrote in the jour­nal, Emo­tion Re­view.

Yet de­spite its preva­lence, peo­ple don’t of­ten talk about lone­li­ness. “It’s the psy­cho­log­i­cal equiv­a­lent to be­ing a loser in life, or a weak per­son,” John Ca­cioppo, who spent decades study­ing lone­li­ness be­fore his sud­den death last year, said in a 2013 TED Talk. Deny­ing lone­li­ness, he told his au­di­ence, is like deny­ing we don’t feel hunger or thirst.

The hu­man brain is an in­cred­i­bly so­cial or­gan. So much of it is ded­i­cated to cre­at­ing and nur­tur­ing re­la­tion­ships, said neu­ro­sci­en­tist and author Dean Bur­nett. “A great deal of our in­ter­ac­tions aren’t for any par­tic­u­lar pur­pose be­yond the in­ter­ac­tion it­self, which ce­ments and en­riches so­cial bonds.”

Think of gos­sip, or chat­ting. It’s not re­ally so much the ac­tual ex­change of in­for­ma­tion that’s im­por­tant, Bur­nett said, but how long we spend gab­bing. “We are an in­tensely so­cial species, arguably the most so­cial of all.”

Yet mod­ern ur­ban life leaves many peo­ple feel­ing adrift, left out, alone, said Dr. Allen Frances, one of the world’s fore­most psy­chi­a­trists.

“In­ter­net so­cial net­work­ing helps some find a place of vir­tual be­long­ing,” the emer­i­tus pro­fes­sor of psy­chi­a­try at Duke University said. But on­line re­la­tion­ships pro­vide only the shadow of real ones. “They can be a life raft for those who have noth­ing else,” he said. “But they can also be an an­chor that drags peo­ple into even more iso­la­tion.”

In their book, Bored, Lonely An­gry, Stupid: Chang­ing Feel­ings about Tech­nol­ogy, from the Tele­graph to Twit­ter, Su­san Matt and Luke Fer­nan­dez ar­gue that to­day’s mod­ern technologies have raised hopes for con­stant so­cia­bil­ity, while mak­ing us se­ri­ously para­noid about be­ing lonely.

Matt and Fer­nan­dez read di­aries, let­ters and mem­oirs of 19th and 20th cen­tury Amer­i­cans when re­search­ing their book. They also in­ter­viewed liv­ing Amer­i­cans, many in their home state of Utah.

“One thing we found in our re­search is that con­tem­po­rary in­di­vid­u­als liv­ing in this dig­i­tal world feel more sur­prised that they’re lonely,” said Matt, a pro­fes­sor of his­tory at We­ber State University. “And, so, they worry about it more. And psy­chol­o­gists have made it more of a pathol­ogy than it was be­fore.”

The emo­tion as­so­ci­ated with feel­ing lonely has changed over time, and it doesn’t mean the same thing it meant to gen­er­a­tions be­fore us, she said. “It’s very clear from read­ing 19th cen­tury let­ters and jour­nals that peo­ple felt lonely, or ‘lone­some,’ as they called it. And they didn’t like it, but they also weren’t sur­prised by it.”

An em­blem­atic ex­am­ple is a Google Ngram, which lets users track how English words and phrases have ap­peared in pub­lished works. The word “soli­tude” was used much more in the 19th cen­tury and has been in steady de­cline since, Fer­nan­dez said. “Con­versely, the world lone­li­ness has been in­creas­ing.”

When 19th cen­tury peo­ple ex­pe­ri­enced alone­ness, some clearly longed for so­cial con­nec­tions. “But of­ten they fol­lowed up with the next sen­tence, ‘God will be with me,’ or ‘I’ll use this time to improve my­self,” Matt said.

Put an­other way, peo­ple back then didn’t see the state of be­ing alone as in­her­ently bad or harm­ful.

The term “loner” only emerged in mid-20th cen­tury Amer­ica. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, jour­nal ar­ti­cles ex­plored lone­li­ness in the sub­urbs, as peo­ple moved from cities. Mod­ern cul­ture, with its more mo­bile pop­u­la­tion, can be a fac­tor in the uptick in lone­li­ness, Bur­nett said.

“The mod­ern na­ture of work means it’s com­mon to have to chase em­ploy­ment, for com­pa­nies to pick up sticks and re­lo­cate, and peo­ple will in­vari­ably go where the op­por­tu­ni­ties are, be­cause they need to, to sur­vive,” he said, adding there are fewer com­mu­ni­ties of yes­ter­year, where ev­ery­one knows what their role is and who their neigh­bours are.

Again, Bur­nett adds, there are many ways in which this is a good thing. “The old com­mu­ni­ties were un­doubt­edly re­stric­tive and sti­fling, especially for women and those lower down the hi­er­ar­chy who wouldn’t have op­por­tu­ni­ties to achieve any­thing be­yond suf­fo­cat­ing gen­der roles and re­stric­tions.”

As to why lone­li­ness seems more of a thing lately, Lane said part of it could come down to the mod­ern be­lief that we have to be happy, all the time.

“The brain can’t sus­tain be­ing con­stantly happy, it’s not good for us,” he said. “But en­cour­ag­ing the be­lief that not be­ing happy means some­thing is wrong sets peo­ple up for im­pos­si­ble goals. So lone­li­ness be­comes the norm.”

It’s not clear which sex is lone­lier. Men tend to have higher lone­li­ness scores than women, cul­tural his­to­rian Bound Al­berti said, arguably be­cause women are en­cour­aged to talk about their feel­ings.

But younger women re­ported more lone­li­ness in the An­gus Reid sur­vey. Per­haps younger women are un­der the great­est pres­sure when it comes to so­ci­etal ex­pec­ta­tions, Bur­nett said. Women are ex­pected to look at­trac­tive, but not too at­trac­tive, “to be self-suf­fi­cient but sub­mis­sive, have kids, but not too early or too late. En­gag­ing with oth­ers is a big de­mand when you’re con­stantly wor­ried about be­ing judged.”

But link­ing such sta­tis­tics to a lone­li­ness “epi­demic” is prob­lem­atic, Bound Al­berti said. “It’s not al­ways clear whether we are talk­ing about iso­la­tion or so­cial cir­cum­stances, which can change — how many of these women are new mums, for in­stance,” she said.

We can expect to be lonely at some mo­ments in our lives, especially tran­si­tional ones, and she won­ders what dif­fer­ent emo­tions and life ex­pe­ri­ences are be­ing lumped un­der the broad idea of “lone­li­ness.”

In Bound Al­berti’s new book, A Bi­og­ra­phy of Lone­li­ness: The His­tory of An Emo­tion, she ar­gues lone­li­ness is a prod­uct of ne­olib­eral in­di­vid­u­al­ism. Us­ing a se­ries of case stud­ies, from so­cial me­dia to Queen Vic­to­ria to Sylvia Plath, she shows how emo­tions change over time.

“And while it’s true that peo­ple could have ex­pe­ri­enced dis­con­tent at­tached to the state of be­ing alone,” she said, the na­ture of soli­tude has changed. “Be­fore the mod­ern era, no­body was ever truly alone be­cause the idea of God was there.”

In­di­vid­u­al­ism and na­tion­al­ism took away the safety blan­ket that meant we au­to­mat­i­cally “be­longed” to some sense of com­mu­nity, whether that was good or bad, adds Bound Al­berti, co-founder of the Cen­tre for the His­tory of Emo­tions at Queen Mary University of Lon­don. “At its ex­treme, in­di­vid­u­al­ism states that we are not only dis­con­nected from oth­ers, but in com­pe­ti­tion with them.”

The rise of pop­ulism can fur­ther pit peo­ple against oth­ers — blacks, Mex­i­cans, im­mi­grants — while at the same time cre­at­ing a seem­ing sense of be­long­ing.

The “Make Amer­ica great again” ral­ly­ing cam­paign slo­gan “the­o­ret­i­cally rep­re­sents a com­mon pur­pose — or a new ‘re­li­gion,’ given how evan­gel­i­cal Trump’s ral­lies can ap­pear,” Bound Al­berti said “But it’s based on ex­clu­sion, di­vi­sion and dif­fer­ence.”

Still, she and oth­ers say the word “epi­demic” isn’t par­tic­u­larly help­ful. It sug­gests the prob­lem has a will of its own, that it’s some­how in­evitable, that it’s a med­i­cal dis­or­der and not a so­cial ill stem­ming from ma­jor struc­tural changes to our cul­tures, life­styles and re­la­tion­ships.

But Fer­nan­dez and Matt don’t want to triv­i­al­ize lone­li­ness in any way. “Iso­la­tion is at best un­com­fort­able, and can be far worse,” Matt said.

Technologies have primed us to be­lieve that we can have an end­less num­ber of friends and con­stant so­cia­bil­ity, she said. “The idea is that, you can go to the web, and you’ll never be alone, even at night. On Twit­ter, Face­book or a dat­ing app, there is sup­posed to al­ways be some­one there. Ear­lier gen­er­a­tions knew there were times when you were just go­ing to have to sit by your­self. You hoped to break that up with so­cial events, but you didn’t expect a con­stant flood of peo­ple into your life.”

Scrolling through other peo­ple’s feeds can also make peo­ple feel like they’re fail­ures, in­fe­rior, ex­cluded — lonely.

Henry David Thoreau lived off the grid for two years in a cabin he built for him­self, where he wrote some of the more cel­e­brated texts in Amer­i­can po­lit­i­cal thought, Fer­nan­dez notes. But even Thoreau didn’t want only soli­tude (when he tired of be­ing alone, he traipsed into Con­cord, Mass., and had din­ner with con­fi­dant and friend Ralph Waldo Emer­son).

For many peo­ple — sin­gle, work­ing moth­ers, the el­derly in nurs­ing homes, the over­worked, the broke — “there is sim­ply no lever they can pull to feel more con­nected, “psy­chol­o­gist Vicki Ohm-Lan­ner­holm wrote on Mad in Amer­ica. The poor­est so­cial groups re­port the high­est lev­els of lone­li­ness, and peo­ple with men­tal ill­nesses are the loneli­est on the planet, adds Frances. Psy­chi­atric pa­tients are “ter­ri­bly ne­glected in, and ex­truded by, our so­ci­ety.”

There’s no sim­ple so­lu­tion, and no pill that’s go­ing to make the lonely less numb. But know­ing that lone­li­ness ebbs and flows, and that it can be shaped by the “lone­li­ness in­dus­try” can help us de­velop a deeper un­der­stand­ing of the ex­pe­ri­ence, Fer­nan­dez said. We need a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of who is lonely, why and, Bound Al­berti said, what com­mu­nity means in the 21st cen­tury.

Ev­ery­one agrees we need to pro­vide more and bet­ter care to the el­derly. In the English town of Burn­ha­mon-Sea, “chat” benches are be­ing in­stalled in town parks to help com­bat lone­li­ness. (“Sit here if you don’t mind some­one stop­ping to say hello,” the signs read.) Bri­tish GPs are “so­cial pre­scrib­ing” dance, cook­ing and art classes to the lonely.

Friendly benches are one thing. Drugs are an­other, and Lane asks whether it’s wise to try to use them to dial down the brain’s alarm sys­tem in the lonely.

He notes how Ca­cioppo has also re­searched the ef­fects of giv­ing the hor­mone oxy­tocin to those with chronic lone­li­ness. But re­cent stud­ies sug­gest the hor­mone in­ten­si­fies “in-group” bonds, height­en­ing the ugly emo­tions of xeno­pho­bia, race prej­u­dice and eth­no­cen­trism.

“Phar­ma­co­log­i­cally speak­ing,” Lane said, “we don’t ap­pear to get the ben­e­fits with­out added — and of­ten un­fore­seen — costs.”