Image by Petra Eriksson from @artists4longtermcare is a social action initiative that uses art and storytelling to raise awareness of the crisis facing residents and staff in long-term care facilities during the Covid-19 pandemic I continue to marvel at how very blind we, as a society, are to ageism. Doesn’t anyone else notice that when […]
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How improvisation gives us a powerful tool for moving from “How things should be” to “What can we create given what exists?” – and the most humanizing shot at relating to the strangeness, the fluidity and the uncertainty of dementia (and pandemic life) in ways that promote intimacy and growth rather than frustration and humiliation.
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Eldercare teams are wearing brave faces right now. They’re keeping their heads down and doing what needs to be done in the midst of this horrible crisis. They’re feeling the pain of seeing hospital workers and first responders being rightly honored, while their own work seems all but invisible to the world.
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Media coverage of anything aging-related has long been characterized by alarmist hand-wringing, the most egregious example being the gray tsunami metaphor. Coverage of the pandemic is no exception, given that an estimated 80% of COVID19-related deaths are of people over 85, many occurring in nursing homes where the virus has run largely unchecked. Typical headlines read, “Ageism on the […]
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Baby Boomers soared through their 60s and early 70s, shattering ageist stereotypes as they went but many have yet to realize that they still have an ageist view of old age. No wonder so many dread it. “The Last Spell of Ageism” relates my own efforts to overturn ageist views of the last stage of life and to see it in a life-enhancing way.
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The people working in nursing homes do not need blame right now. They do need supplies, encouragement, and love.
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Why is coronavirus spreading across the US? Not because a virulent virus jumped from an animal into a human. Not because of China, or selfish youngers and clueless olders. COVID is spreading because the virus is new and contagious and because we live under a system that picks profit over people at every turn. The […]
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I had hoped, with the current focus on healthcare workers as heroes, that the demonizing of nursing homes would cease during the pandemic.
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