Connect Hackney

A report from the Older People’s Wellbeing conference

In March Connect Hackney staff attended a conference on older people’s wellbeing. There were several interesting presentations. Kate Jopling from the International Longevity Centre spoke about the need to think about personal or emotional causes of loneliness such as shyness or mental health problems and to separate these from structural causes such as inaccessible transport or poverty.

Kate argued that both the personal and the structural elements of loneliness need to be overcome in order for older people to build relationships and overcome isolation.

Ageism was another key theme of the conference. There was discussion on how to approach ageing, how younger people feel about older people and how older people can sometimes accept negative stereotypes about themselves.

As we all know, we live in an ageist society where boredom, loneliness and sadness are thought of as ‘normal’ parts of later life. In fact a recent study found that 25% of young adults thought that depression and unhappiness were normal parts of growing older.

Dr Alex Bailey, a consultant older people’s psychiatrist from the Westminster Older Adults Community Mental Health Team, gave a presentation on how ageist assumptions about being miserable in later life means that doctors often ignore signs of depression in older people and don’t diagnose it as a health condition. He gave some really positive statistics on how well older people respond to antidepressants and said that we must fight for older people’s mental health services, especially because older people respond so well to treatment.

However, he did note that many talking therapy services are inaccessible for disabled people and few, if any, services offer home visits.
The conference gave the Connect Hackney team a lot to think about in how to overcome ageism and what we can collectively do to tackle ageism in Hackney. The Older People’s Committee are working with the staff team to develop an anti-ageism campaign.

Hackney Senior will be covering the campaign and how you can get involved so keep an eye out for updates in future issues.

Judy Harris