Quality of Life Among the Elderly: a Question of Respect

(Original title: "La qualité de vie au troisième âge : une question de respect". Article published in: Les Cahiers des journées de formation annuelle du sanatorium Bégin, No. 9, 1990, p.1-16.)

Bernard Groulx

Summary

An elderly person's quality of life is defined, first and foremost, by the respect they have for themselves, something over which they have power, and secondly, by the respect the outside world shows them. It is easy to identify seniors who are excited about life. They are active and are well groomed, they watch what they eat and do not sleep their days away. They do not seek to isolate themselves at home or in nursing homes. Those who continue to cultivate their minds and pass on their life experiences enjoy a superior quality of life.

There is nothing more distressing than feeling dependant and useless in one's golden years - a stage in which Dr. Bernard Groulx has observed three types of existential pain:

1. Moral: often low due to the fact that we venerate youth.
2. Morality: values increasingly differ between generations.
3. Death: obsession developed by many elderly who, given their life experience, should be better equipped to wait for the end in a more serene fashion.

From a health care staff's position, showing an elderly person respect consists in calling on one's skills and sympathy as well as one's intuition. The elderly patient often presents, as part of his pathology, a complex clinical profile and exhibits different symptoms than would be present in a younger person with the same problem. Two mistakes are commonly made by physicians: overmedicating elderly patients and not prescribing antidepressants in the event of a major affective disorder - almost as though it were normal to be depressed after a certain age. In fact, many physicians have an erroneous preconceived idea that most seniors suffer from dementia and will therefore take the wrong approach, whereas in reality, only a minority of patients are affected.

Another deplorable phenomenon here is that physicians act as though an elderly person's illness is hopeless. This is contrary to the European school of though in geriatric centres where health care staff carry out their duties believing that it is only a matter of time before patients regain their health. We must therefore find a happy medium between knowing when to make more of an effort and knowing when to let nature run its course. As a result, geriatric specialists are called upon to demystify old age within the medical system and society.