Old Age Social Construction

“Old age is a social construction. Discuss this statement and how it relates to health care for people with dementia in Australia. Support your argument with recent Australian data and at least one sociological concept or theory”

Dementia is a condition associated with cognitive decline, that, whilst not a natural part of ageing, often affects older people (65+ years) as they age. However, old age is a socially constructed concept, wherein theories such as medicalization, stigma, and intersectionality majorly impact the epidemiological data. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), dementia is one of the top three leading causes of death. This is likely due to the medicalization of dementia, which does not consider it a normal

However, as dementia is frequently unrecognised and/or undiagnosed until it’s latter stages, these approaches are ineffective. For dementia, there is often a significant gap between when symptoms are first identified, and when help is first sought from a health professional; a further gap proceeds before the condition is diagnosed. A New South Wales study reported that there was an approximated 23 months between when symptoms were initially noticed, and the first health professional consultation, proceeded by another estimated 37 months before a concrete diagnosis. This vastly contrasts with the data from a six-country European survey for Alzheimer’s disease, where the gap until the first physician consultation was 11 months, and the average time from symptom recognition to a diagnosis was 20 months. This gap has been suggested to be due to an interplay of factors that create barriers to diagnosis at the mild stage. They included aspects relating to the primary health care providers, where lack of knowledge and/or time to identify and diagnose dementia, limited access to specialists for diagnosis confirmation, and challenges in communicating the diagnosis were concerns. Another barrier was the inability to identify dementia’s early symptoms, and delay to seek help by the patients and careers were also barriers. Furthermore, systemic factors such as financial

It is conceptualised by Erving Goffman (1963) as “the situation of the individual who is disqualified from full social acceptance”, and refers to “the attitudes we normals have towards a person with a stigma, and the actions we take in regard to him” (Goffman, 1963). He identified three distinct types of stigma, the first being individual stigmata, which referred to physical irregularities; the second, deviant individuals, which denoted “blemishes of individual character…weak will…passions, treacherous and rigid beliefs, and dishonesty” (Goffman, 1963); and tribal identities, which included condemned conditions of sex, race, religion, and nationality. As a result of these, stigmatised individuals become excluded, blamed, or belittled by society for the characteristics they possess (Weis et al., 2006), and attain what Goffman (1963) terms a “spoiled