Review

Pages on older ages

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GROWING OLD: LOOKING FORWARD
Robert Slater
Open University Press, 1995, £13.99

Many people will like this book very much. It covers an enormous range of material which is relevant to later life and would make a good introduction for anyone with an interest in ageing. As the subtitle ‘looking forward’ indicates, the overall tenor of the book is upbeat, though Slater is not unremittingly optimistic and does acknowledge the problems of old age in modern Britain. There is useful advice to those growing old, like thinking about their coping strategies and not giving up attempts to learn new things. Memory does decrease with age for most people, but our surplus capacity allows us to go on learning even at advanced ages.

‘Psychology’ is very broadly interpreted and this is the great strength of the book. It offers far more than the usual, rather dry discussions of cognitive decline. A professional who reads it has immediate access to literature summaries (with many quotations) which cover ageism (chapter 1 is ‘Us and ‘Them’), daily life in later life including grandparenting, women, and the old as survivors.

‘Coping and Failing to Cope’ includes depression and anxiety but mental illness in later life gets little space in this book. Support is dealt with in much greater detail in ‘Belonging — supportive relationships’ which presents a good review of the literature on friends and family and living alone. Chapters 7 to 10 are short and give useful overviews of the state of our knowledge on how older people makes sense of living and dying. So we have sections on Purpose, Reminiscence and its place in Finding Meaning and Reconstructing Reality in the face of death.

The strongest chapters are, as might be expected, ‘Speed of Behaviour’ and ‘Our Changing Brain—causes, effects and responses’. It seems unfair to criticise a book for remaining within disciplinary limits but it is a weakness that like most psychology texts, the discussion is entirely within a Western paradigm and takes no account of cultural or ethnic difference (although ethnic minorities are mentioned briefly in chapter 2 ‘On Being Older’).

The other problem is that Slater is inclusive rather than critical. So, for example, we have a discussion of suicide in later life without any ackowledgement that suicide statistics can be misleading for any age group, but possibly most of all for older people whose deaths can easily be recorded in ways that spare the feelings of family members left behind.