Ageism: kicking one of the last socially acceptable prejudices into touch

A leading expert on ageing has said society needs to stop thinking of older people in terms of “us versus them” and reassess the often negative language used when talking about the over-65s.

Trish D’Antonio, the executive director of the US National Center to Reframe Aging, said one of the most widespread terms employed when talking about late adulthood is “us versus them, like always using the word ‘they’ to talk about older people.”

Pointing out that everyone is a member of an ageing population from the moment they’re born, Ms D’Antonio said when she’s asked how collective misconceptions about older people can best be tackled in the wider community, she explains “the us versus them is really a place where I tell people to start first…if I’m a health care practitioner and I have to write an education piece, or if you’re working on a website, a webpage, write what you have to write, and then go through and see how many times you refer to older people as ‘they’ – when ‘they’ age – and really think about how we can make it about all of us as we age.”

The language used to describe older people is another area Ms D’Antonio said she sees an opportunity for positive change.

“I have to admit that I use this term – not recently – but when we talk about the ‘silver tsunami’, so that fatalistic thinking, that crisis thinking. It’s very negative.

“What would you do if someone was telling you there was a tsunami coming? You’d run. So, really thinking about how we phrase and recognise we are all members of our community is so important and so valuable.

“And it can even be as subtle as when we start talking about statistics about older people…if we frontload any discussion with statistics, people start to say, ‘that’s a little bit too much for me to handle’.

“Really you can start to talk about your solution first, your systemic solution. Maybe the statistics come in the second paragraph.

“The last way that I think would be really good… is when we talk about what we call a super senior, that person who is 80 years old and has just run a marathon, which is fantastic, but what is the context that helps support that person?

Trish D’Antonio, executive director of The National Center to Reframe Aging

“There is transportation, there are sidewalks, so they run every day on a sidewalk. There are other services in the community, other supports in the community, that help that person continue to be able to run the marathon, or jump out of the airplane.

“You can make a significant change by just tweaking a little about what you say and what you write.”

The National Center to Reframe Aging is led by The Gerontological Society of America and is a long-term social change endeavour working to improve the public’s understanding of what growing older means and the many positive ways the over 65’s contribute to society.

Ms D’Antonio shared her thoughts on ageing in a new Vlog chaired by Rear Admiral Paul Reed, director of the US Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, in which they discussed the importance of highlighting older people’s contributions to society and addressing ageism and the collective misconceptions.

She described ageism as “any kind of discrimination towards older people. When we think about definitions of ageisim, it goes a little more deeply to think about not only the external ageism that we may experience but our own internalised ageism. It’s a constant battle and one that really has health implications for us all.”

With the global population ageing – the World Health Organisation predicts there will be 2.1 billion people aged 60-plus by 2050, with the number of over-80s expected to triple to 426 million in the next 27 years – the need to change how society speaks and thinks about older adults, has never been more critical.

Ms D’Antonio told Rear Admiral Reed: “We are bombarded with messages that give us a negative perception or, maybe not always negative, but a singular perception of what it means to grow old.

“We see that from a very young age. We see that on television, we hear that in jokes that people tell, so we really hear that in our culture.”

She continued: “When we talk about ageism…this is any kind of discrimination toward older people. What we do recognise about ageism is that ageism can occur across the life course, so while our project is focused on older people certainly, we hear ageism across the life course.

“People will make comments about someone being too young to be part of something. She’s too young to run that department. She’s 24. As if your chronological age has something to do with it.”

But having a positive internal perception of ageing can be good for our health, Ms D’Antonio said. She shared research conducted by a team at Yale University that had shown that people’s internal positive perceptions of ageing could increase their life span by more than seven-and-a-half years.

Ms D’Antonio commented: “When we think about that internalised ageism, that can impact our health and wellbeing…that doesn’t start at a certain age. That impacts our health and well-being across the life course….it doesn’t start at 60 or 65. It starts when we’re born.”

To listen to the full interview between Ms D’Antonio and Rear Admiral Reed, click here