Thammasat University students who are interested in sociology, economics, business, cultural and social anthropology, geriatrics, the allied health sciences, and related subjects may find a newly available book useful.
Silver Empowerment: Fostering Strengths and Connections for an Age-Friendly Society is an Open Access book, available for free download at this link:
https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/61570
The TU Library collection includes many other books about different aspects of geriatrics.
The World Health Organization (WHO) website states:
Thailand is among the fastest ageing countries in the world. Of its 67 million population, 12 million Thais, are elderly according to the latest national statistics report. Since 2005, the country has been classified as an ‘aged society’ as people aged 60 years and above accounted for 10% of the population. It is expected that the country’s elderly population will increase to 28% and that Thailand will become a ‘super-aged society’ by the next decades.
The publisher’s description of the book follows:
The strengths and opportunities of ageing and the ageing population. Silver empowerment is a valuable paradigm to improve care and support systems for older persons. It aims to counteract the dominant image of ageing, which is all too often one of decline, dependency and vulnerability, and rather sees ageing and the ageing population as a challenge that opens up new opportunities.
By focusing on the strengths and connections of older persons, silver empowerment strives for an inclusive, age-friendly society that will allow everyone to grow old with dignity and meaning. In this book, leading academics from a variety of disciplines discuss ways to enhance the empowerment of older persons in practice.
Covering a wide range of topics such as resilience, loneliness, community-based care, the interplay between formal and informal care, the inclusion of older persons’ perspectives in research and care, and empowering policy, Silver Empowerment is of interest to academics, policy makers and practitioners interested in empowerment and care and support systems for older persons.
An introduction notes:
With the introduction of the concept ‘Silver Empowerment’, we would like to express our vision on older people. In the psychology of colours, silver represents reflection and illumination, opening new doors, a change of direction for the future.
Silver is also associated with characteristics such as calmness, sensitivity and looking for the best in others .
‘Silver Empowerment’ aims to counteract the dominant image of ageing, which is all too often one of decline, loss, dependency and vulnerability. This ‘ageism’ image is problematic because the way we think about ageing influences the way we deal and socialise with older persons.
When we consider older persons as unproductive members of society who are unable to participate, we also consciously – or not – exclude them from participating. With a fresh silver image, we want to move away from the dominant grey image of older persons as dependent, passive citizens.
‘Silver Empowerment’ strives to provide opportunities for each person to grow old with dignity and meaning, warmly connected to a society that invites them to participate. In contrast to the World Health Organization’s concept of ‘active ageing’, which justly emphasises society’s responsibility to provide opportunities for older persons to participate in social, political and economic activities, Silver Empowerment does not overlook realities of social inequality, vulnerability and disadvantage, nor does it impose a singular ideal of how older people should live.
Instead, Silver Empowerment seeks to expand meaningful choices through which older people can maximally gain mastery over their own lives. Unfortunately, to this day too much is done for older persons, and too little is done by and with older persons.
Therefore, Silver Empowerment emphasizes the need to appeal more to the strengths and capacities of older persons, without neglecting their vulnerabilities. According to the empowerment paradigm, people gain strength and grow through connections, and inversely strength results in more connections.
Indeed, research has repeatedly shown that social relations and connectedness to others reinforces the resilience of older persons by giving them information and instrumental support, encouraging coping behaviour and enhancing self-esteem.
Resilience in turn contributes to a general sense of mastery and enables older people to overcome adversities and safeguard their well-being. Indeed, people need sufficient strength and resilience, for example in the form of social capacities and skills, to form steady social relations and feel connected to others. […]
By including ‘the insider perspective’ of older persons, the so-called outsiders can gain more understanding of the lifeworld of older persons, which results in more comprehension and a more positive image of the latter.
Moreover, acknowledging the value of experiential knowledge of older persons forms an important source of strength for this group and is a key element of the empowerment paradigm.
Practices and policy should not be developed for older persons, but together with them. No empowerment can exist without participation, without considering what is meaningful for older people.
To accomplish this, we must create spaces for respectful dialogue and reciprocity that enables the empowerment of older persons. We call these spaces ‘enabling niches’. These enabling niches refer to ‘safe havens’, social spaces that offer resources and opportunities through which older persons can develop their skills and undertake meaningful interactions with others.
Such spaces avoid stigma and define (older) persons as individuals who each have specific wishes, goals and characteristics. That way, older persons feel recognised and appreciated, and can grow by appealing to their strengths.
As a multilevel concept, empowerment upholds a relational picture of society where factors on the individual, organisational and community level are inherently interconnected.
From this follows that the mechanisms of exclusion can also be found on all these levels, and that there is a shared responsibility for exclusion which needs to consider various domains such as social participation, housing, health and social care.
That way, empowerment clearly contains a political component and moves away from the narrative of blaming the victim (and blaming the system). Indeed, individuals, organisations and the system all have agency within certain boundaries, and thus form part of the solution with respect to mechanisms of exclusion.
Therefore, all stakeholders in society should contribute and counteract exclusion and ageism: older persons themselves, professionals, social organisations, academics and policymakers.
Silver Empowerment does not frame ageing and the ageing population as a problem, but rather sees it as a challenge opening new opportunities. By focusing on the strengths and connections of older persons, Silver Empowerment strives to realise an inclusive, warm and age-friendly society that gives older people a voice and influence.
Too often this is not realised in practice. This book offers a different philosophy, a drastic shift in the way we look at the health and social care system for older persons and in how we look at ageing in general.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)