How mental health professionals perceive old(er) adults

Abstract

This multidisciplinary work mainly uses a discourse analytical approach (Fairclough 1995; Sarangi 2010a, 2010b) and fine tools (i.e., corpora and text analysis software, Baker 2010) in order to identify the possible presence of ageism (Butler 1969) from responses provided by psychologists who completed the Fraboni Scale of Ageism (Fraboni et al. 1990) used in the Italian validation (Donizzetti 2010) and further adapted to achieve the objective of this study. In fact, for each item (Tot=19) distributed along this 3-dimensional model (separation and avoidance; stereotypes and antilocution; affective attitudes and discrimination), 177 respondents were asked to express their (dis)agreement, not with numbers, as in the traditional scale, but with a text (D’Amico et al. 2020). With reference to the above-mentioned dimensions, some results unveiled the psychologists’ recurring belief system as follows: 38% of respondents believed that old people complain much more than other people, thus confirming their idea of a separate group from theirs; 35.7% thought that the elderly should be entrusted with the care of infants only when supervised, thus fitting the stereotype of the fixed age-identity category; and 80.6 % declared that they were unwilling to reciprocate if an old person initiated a conversation for external and/or context/personality-dependent reasons, thus justifying their discriminatory attitudes. Limited but not negligible results demonstrate a need for mental health education and training to be monitored in order to better understand the professionals’ belief system that emerges from their discourse on old age, because the reiteration of the same belief system, if cemented in social memory, has the strong effect of conferring an aura of objectivity to prevailing attitudes towards old(er) adults, and of inevitably affecting standard professional inter/actions with them.