Enhancing Counselor Awareness While Working with the Aging Paper

Four elements in seven hundred and fifty words means roughly a hundred and eighty each, so the reflective opening cannot be half the paper. It also should not be a confession that stands alone. The stereotype section earns its place only if the beliefs you identify show up again in the clinical sections, and the clearest way to do that is to pick stereotypes with clinical consequences. Believing that decline is normal ageing is why depression in late life goes untreated and why new confusion gets attributed to age rather than investigated. Believing older adults are not interested in sex, or in change, or in psychotherapy, each removes a question a counsellor would otherwise ask. Choose two or three of those rather than cataloguing every ageist assumption, because the paper is short and each one you name has to be carried through to the sections that follow.

Then be accurate about the physical and cognitive material, because that is where the assignment checks whether you have read anything. Normal ageing involves slowed processing speed, reduced hearing and vision, changes in sleep architecture, and altered pharmacokinetics that make older adults more sensitive to psychotropic medication. Significant memory impairment is not normal ageing and should be assessed. On treatment, say what actually differs: depression presenting somatically rather than as reported sadness, delirium being mistaken for dementia and dementia for depression, high rates of comorbidity and polypharmacy, bereavement and loss as recurrent rather than singular, and a suicide rate in older men that is the highest of any group. Note also that psychotherapy works in this population, which contradicts the stereotype you opened with. End-of-life considerations then cover advance directives, capacity, grief, dignity, and the counsellor's own discomfort with mortality, which is clinical material rather than a private matter and belongs in supervision.