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Successful Adaptation in the Context of Care Environments: Promise and Challenge From a Career in Geropsychology

My first clinical exposure to older adults was in a psychiatric hospital, to people with life-long severe mental illnesses; I was drawn to their perseverance. The older people we see clinically interact with care environments that may or may not effectively use patients’ personal histories. I have s...

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Autor principal: Meeks, Suzanne
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Oxford University Press 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7742108/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igaa057.2087
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author Meeks, Suzanne
author_facet Meeks, Suzanne
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description My first clinical exposure to older adults was in a psychiatric hospital, to people with life-long severe mental illnesses; I was drawn to their perseverance. The older people we see clinically interact with care environments that may or may not effectively use patients’ personal histories. I have studied the affective experiences of older people in care environments--the mental health system and long-term care--to improve mental health care and well-being. Solutions seem obvious, and difficult. Theory and abundant empirical research tell us that environments can support adaptation through nurturing strengths, offering compensatory tools, and acknowledging losses. My work on depression is a simple example of how this can work in psychotherapy. Yet implementing simple solutions means overcoming barriers of training, resources, and institutional inertia. The promise is understanding age as the dynamic representation of a life span; the challenge is making this understanding work for older people.
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spelling pubmed-77421082020-12-21 Successful Adaptation in the Context of Care Environments: Promise and Challenge From a Career in Geropsychology Meeks, Suzanne Innov Aging Abstracts My first clinical exposure to older adults was in a psychiatric hospital, to people with life-long severe mental illnesses; I was drawn to their perseverance. The older people we see clinically interact with care environments that may or may not effectively use patients’ personal histories. I have studied the affective experiences of older people in care environments--the mental health system and long-term care--to improve mental health care and well-being. Solutions seem obvious, and difficult. Theory and abundant empirical research tell us that environments can support adaptation through nurturing strengths, offering compensatory tools, and acknowledging losses. My work on depression is a simple example of how this can work in psychotherapy. Yet implementing simple solutions means overcoming barriers of training, resources, and institutional inertia. The promise is understanding age as the dynamic representation of a life span; the challenge is making this understanding work for older people. Oxford University Press 2020-12-16 /pmc/articles/PMC7742108/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igaa057.2087 Text en © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Abstracts
Meeks, Suzanne
Successful Adaptation in the Context of Care Environments: Promise and Challenge From a Career in Geropsychology
title Successful Adaptation in the Context of Care Environments: Promise and Challenge From a Career in Geropsychology
title_full Successful Adaptation in the Context of Care Environments: Promise and Challenge From a Career in Geropsychology
title_fullStr Successful Adaptation in the Context of Care Environments: Promise and Challenge From a Career in Geropsychology
title_full_unstemmed Successful Adaptation in the Context of Care Environments: Promise and Challenge From a Career in Geropsychology
title_short Successful Adaptation in the Context of Care Environments: Promise and Challenge From a Career in Geropsychology
title_sort successful adaptation in the context of care environments: promise and challenge from a career in geropsychology
topic Abstracts
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7742108/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igaa057.2087
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