social attitudes towards the aged and death
What are the prevailing social attitudes towards the aged and death? Our attitudes towards the aged and death have roots in past attitudes and are not fixed, and therefore will continue to evolve into the future, as they have done through the past. In this essay, the prevailing attitudes towards the aged and death will be discussed separately. To identify these attitudes it is important to look back through history to gain an understanding of how we came to hold certain ideas and feelings about the aged and death. It is inevitable that the social attitudes towards the aged have changed dramatically throughout time. Generally speaking, aged people have been much more revered in society in the past than their modern day counterparts. ... There is one reason for the change in social attitude towards the aged that stands above the rest. This is the fact that there are now many more aged people in society than in the past, and to survive to old age is not as much of a feat as it once was. ... Such a large difference in only under one hundreds years means that changes to the social attitudes towards the aged have happened dramatically, especially because old age as we would define it today, barely existed, and was very rare at that time. Another reason for today’s social attitude towards the aged being very different to the past is the change from a traditional model of health. This model of health would have been monopolized by the aged (shamans etc.) as they were looked towards for the sustenance of health in treatments and cures. ... An important part of addressing the social attitudes towards the aged is defining who is considered age in our culture. This very definition tells us a lot about what these attitudes are. ... This retirement age can itself be aging to a person who may otherwise not feel themselves to be aged. Forced retirement can have a huge impact on whether a person considers themselves to be aged. ... This attitude which may be coming from outside themselves, from society, may in fact produce the effect of aging the person as they feel the pressure to take on more and more of the characteristics of an ‘aged’ person. ... Another factor which allows society to deem a person aged is their physical competence. Society associated being aged with specific physical conditions and illnesses. ... In Birren’s study of healthy aged men (Birren, 1968 cited in Barrow, Smith, 1979, p. ... This finding then begs the question, why is the social attitude towards the aged so stereotyped?