ASA Business and Aging Awards Symposium
Friday, March 17, 04:30 PM - 06:00 PM
Dr. Shabahangi representing Pacific Institute and the AgeSong Senior Communities will receive an award for the cutting edge programs sponsored by the AgeSong senior Communities and implemented by Pacific Institute to promote Gerontological Wellness and create Therapeutic Environments. In a joint session awardees -representatives of large and small businesses- will profile their winning programs and illustrate how investing in aging contributes to their success.
Listening to the Language of Dementia: The person behind by Nader R. Shabahangi, Ph. D.
Saturday, March 18, 11:15 AM - 12:00 PM
This presentation will evaluate the prevalent view that our physical and psychological symptoms represent illnesses that we need to cure and remove. Could it be, for example, that the many forms of dementia, including Alzheimer's, are attempts to speak in a language yet unfamiliar to us? Could it be that more than a dis-ease for the person so afflicted, a person's symptom represents a message of sorts?
From a longitudinal study and a clinical and phenomenological research of a population of older adults (60+) experiencing different degrees of dementia (including cerebro-vascular dementia, HIV dementia, and Alzheimer's) Pacific Institute questions the prevalent views on dementia and advance alternative paradigms and interventions to deal with this spread phenomena. By using an existential and process-work oriented approach we will advocate for a change in attitudes that design treatment for people with Dementia including Alzheimer's
Dementia, is a construct: a concept we fill with our own ideas, often pre-conceived by others. Those others might be medical people, psychologists, sociologists, or gerontologists. This presentation will take a look at current definitions and views of dementia, what effects these perceptions have on how we treat and care for patients with dementia, and how we can perhaps change our ideas going forward.
Modern medicine intends to alleviate and remove such disorders or diseases through treatments that eliminate as best as possible the symptom.
In contrast, the idea here is that dementia and its manifestations point to a meaning for us humans that is our choice to understand more deeply rather than to eliminate. Since all viewpoints represent a part of an often multi-layered picture of a phenomenon, I will also refer to, wherever appropriate, the mainstream medical as well as psychological understandings of dementia here.
We will provide an example of a best-practices model that we have initiated in an assisted living facility in San Francisco, California.
The Aging of the Goddess: Self-Esteem for Women in the 21st Century by doris Bersing, Ph.D
Sunday, March 19, 08:45 AM - 09:30 AM
This presentation will stress a topic that is taboo within feminist studies: aging women. On the other hand, it will explore what happened with the dreams of liberation, self-realization, and empowerment that women from the baby-boomer era sheltered.
It is of interest that the feminist movement have, in large part, ignored the issue of aging. In a field in which so many other aspects of body-based identity are recognized, debated, de- and re-constructed, and challenged, the subject of
old age in women remains relatively unexamined and un-theorized - nearly taboo. There are the anti-aging expressions of society that take precedent.
There is a difference between growing old and growing to be an elder. To become an elder takes work, takes a continued struggle to become more aware. This struggle for awareness means a relentless engagement with life and its constantly emerging challenges.
After fighting for equal rights, self-esteem, and living against stereotypes baby-boomer women find themselves in a society that worships youth and relegates its seniors to second-class citizen status, many elderly women end up ignored, mourning their lost youth, freedom, and without all the rights, privileges for what they fought.
What are the issues that aging baby-boomer women face and what alternatives to further the image of feisty revolutionary, to the embodied Goddess of the New Age, to the no-yet-free or free-at-last- but still looking for meaning one. How these "fighters" could become a true elder and what are the issues they need to overcome to do so is the center of this presentation.
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