Question

As individuals approach later adulthood and elderhood, they begin to accept the terminations of old roles and embrace the emergence of new roles, including coming to terms with the concept of death and facing issues related to death. This involves the psychosocial crisis of integrity versus despair for (older adults) and immortality and extinction (elderhood).

1) Assess the challenges and rewards for counselors working with individuals in this stage of life.

2) Discuss some of the characteristic challenges present in the psychosocial crisis in these stages of development.

3) Describe how your family of origin views the process of caring for the elderly within your family and views the process of death. For this portion of your post, begin a separate paragraph, and feel free to respond to this aspect in the first person.

Answer 1

Answer: person in later adulthood or older adults are persons with 65 years of age and above. And counselors working with this group need to know about their roles, psychological crisis and changes in their life. Older adults have age related challenges that are both physical and cognitive. There are many challenges in dealing with this age group but these challenges are rewards also for learning purpose.

Part -1: challenges and rewards for counselors working with individuals in this stage of life:

• As older adults have physical changes for example hearing environment, weakening vision and multiple chronic illness so practitioner need to modify the environment for their testing to ensure optimal performance.
• Counselor need to consider the present mental status and cognitive impairment if present with dealing with older adults. In this case family members or close friends are required for the interview.
• Counselor need to ensure about the conversation with older adult, what is conveyed is received same or not. It needs clarity of speech, speaking in simple way and repeat if required.
• Counselor is also responsible to provide full comfort while session, if person is in pain or discomfort then it is needed to manage immediately.
• Sometimes counselor needs to adjust time to suit the optimal functioning of older adult.
• Use of encouragement and verbal reinforcement is required in most of the cases of older adults.
• Different therapeutic skills are needed to deal with older adults according to their psychological illnesses, for example, patients with depression, anxiety and dementia require different skills to deal with. Therefore assessment and intervention of older adults is a skill full job because of their multiple complaints/ illnesses and reaching to the diagnosis is again a challenge because symptoms of different illnesses can confuse the practitioner so need to be careful in this practice. While dealing with these challenges counselor has good opportunity to learn so these challenges became reward for the counselors of this field.

Part-2: Discuss some of the characteristic challenges present in the psychosocial crisis in these stages of development.

Common Psychological crisis in this age group are anxiety disorders, dementia, delirium, chronic pains, mood disorders and sleep disorders. If we focus on psychological crisis of this age group, some characteristic challenges are given below:

• Depression is often associated with chronic pain. This is especially true among older adults in which the two may coexist and interact. In addition, boredom, loneliness, and bereavement can influence the perception and report of pain.
• Symptoms of different psychological illness can be confused with each other while diagnosis.
• Pain behavior may be reinforced inadvertently by well-meaning family members and others who pay more attention to the individual when he or she is complaining of pain than when there are no physical complaints.
• People with dementia have coexistence of other psychological symptoms of anxiety, depression, paranoia and other behavioral disturbances.
• People at this age need individual attention and family or caregiver often need help in understanding and coping with their illness.

Part-3: Describe how your family of origin views the process of caring for the elderly within your family and views the process of death. For this portion of your post, begin a separate paragraph, and feel free to respond to this aspect in the first person.

Views regarding the care of elderly vary from country to country, community to community and culture to culture. It is totally a family and cultural approach to deal with elders and process of death. For example if we take the case of most of Indian families, where elders stay with their children till death and its children’s responsibility to take care of them, to bear their expenses etc. the process of death vary according to culture, religion or community in India. After death there are some rituals you need to perform for some days, in some religions dead body is burned and in some it is buried. So explanation of this section will vary from individual to individual.