Fear of getting old
'Who will look after me when I become old?'
is the universal concern of the elderly. They live in constant fear of being neglected, forgotten, and abandoned by their family members and friends.
We can speak about a phobia, a really phobia of growing old and every year it become more alarming: one woman on five lives on her first son. This is the new nightmare of the Century! If, in the last twenty years, the problem was: We are too much in the world!, in the Nineties it is: we’re becoming an “old” society and “unproductives” weigh heavily over younger man. More than 200 million in the world are over-sixty. Life’s conditions and ways to defend health get every day better, so the average age increases but, with it, also the problems about “where”, “how” and “why” of a longer life of alone and ill old man.
The first consequence is loneliness, above all psychological and sometimes physical solitude. The psychological one is because of the “role’s loss”: in the family where you are the Patriarch no more, in the job where your technique is exceeded and ignored every day, in social setting, where your sapience is useless.
A man in face of his old aspect can react with surprise, scandal, incredulity; he can let himself go to inactivity or increase his physic and intellectual life; he could defend himself with negation: Goya (1746-1828), when he was sixty years old, painted a self-portrait with forty-year-old man’s aspect! Or he could choose a last, definitive way: suicide’s number is tripled if we speak about over-sixties!
The growing old could present some signs of uneasiness that are ignored if they are felt from an old man, but the society must understand that it concerns a lot of troubles and disturbances: apathy, sadness, depression, memory’s fault are unescapable. We know, today, that mental efficiency don’t go down necessary with time and only learning process are slower; we know also that the only thing we can do to help our “grandparents” is to limit their sense to be alone and unnecessary, for example encouraging them to bring decisions and to take on responsibilities.
Existential embarrassment and malaise don’t come only from economic factors or from the availability of an efficient services’ network. The real problem is the loneliness that it isn’t a personal choice but a condition to be. In Italy, an elderly man who’s ill have to fight with the precariousness of fundamental services: in many hospitals, there isn’t a geriatric section, or intermediary structures (day hospitals, rehabilitation's service; and so on).
Furthermore, medicines’ prescription is very high: to get old provokes anxiety…, well! In the United States anxiolytics are placed third among the medicines used by seniors; in Italy they are second! Even if they could bring to dependence or can have negative effects.
This is not a problem that interest only a group of people, but this
anxiety to see in the mirror the signs of the time affects all ages.
According to the European Dermatologists, who meet themselves in 2004
in Florence in occasion of the XIIIth Congress of the European Academy
of Dermatology and Venereology (EADV), teenagers, very few years ago,
go to specialists only for problem concerning acne, impure skin, hair’s
fall out and stretch mark, now they want to subject themselves to dermacosmetologic
operations to correct wrinkles and spots caused by an excessive solar
exposure or lamp.
But dermatologists are not the only class involved in this kind of maniacal
cures, also plastic surgeons: in 2003, the American Society of Plastic
Surgeons (ASPS) made known that young men’s number who asked for
aesthetic surgery’s operation was more and more increasing. According
to the ASPS the under 18s who underwent themselves to the bistoury are
in the United States 335 thousand. Among them for the first time comes
out the Botox . “Botox-babies” are they called by the New
York Observer, they are 5600 in the States, with a 950% increase defined
incomprehensible by the ASPS.
The situation is the same in the Old Continent: in Italy teenagers who
call for botox injection, chemical peeling and dermo-abrasion are about
6 thousand, almost 60 thousand in Europe. An exemple? “Young women
desire to have plumper lips and decide to undergo collagene injections
to pump them up – declares Torello Lotti, chairman of the EADV congress
– this request, sometimes, is a very neurotic one.”
Lotti denounces also the problems raised from an excessive solar exposure:
“Thirteen-year-old girls today has over her skins the lentigo senilis,
the dark spots that, some years ago, were typical signs of old people,
now renamed lentigo solari because they are caused without doubts by too
much sun.”
In the graver case this fixation could become a illness.
Dismorphophobia is defined as the obsession for an imaginary fault in
the external aspect. The excessive apprehension involves an emotional
strain, social isolation and troubles with relational life, job or school.
Patients have ritualistic, repetitive and obsessive behaviours: to look
at themselves in the looking-glass every moment, to dress up in a very
excessive way, to look for reassurances from parents, friends, doctors.
Young and elderly people, two ages in comparison, two very different
and distant worlds joined by the same fear: the time that goes by…
… Every rose have to fade some day or other…
Webgraphy
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Daiana Liotta CC/207
Elena Simona De Marco CC/219