GBO NEWS: MacArthur Genius Basting’s “Creative Care” Book; Blogger Ronni Bennett’s Oregon Exit: Britain’s “AgeSpeaks” Radio; Race & Mental Health Study; Grantmakers in Aging HIV Report; & More
GENERATIONS BEAT ONLINE NEWS
E-News of the Journalists Network on Generations – Our 27th Year.
December 30, 2020 — Volume 27, Number 14
EDITOR’S NOTE: GBONews, e-news of the Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), publishes alerts for journalists, producers and authors covering generational issues. Send your news of important stories or books (by you and others), fellowships, awards or pertinent kvetches to GBO News Editor Paul Kleyman. To subscribe to GBONews.org at no charge, simply sending a request to Paul with your name, address, phone number and editorial affiliation or note that you freelance. For each issue, you’ll receive the table of contents in an e-mail, so just click through to the full issue at www.gbonews.org. GBONews does not provide its list to other entities.
In This Issue: May the light at the end of your tunnel not be another train.
1. THE BOOKMOBILE: ***Creative Care: A Revolutionary Approach to Dementia and Elder Care by MacArthur “Genius” Anne Basting, PhD, HarperOne.
2. GEN BEATLES NEWS: *** Time Goes By Blogger Ronni Bennett Dies;
*** The Generations Beat Goes International — Italian journalist Stefania Medetti’s “The Age Buster” Interviews East London Radio’s “Age Speaks” Host Mervyn Eastman.
3. RELIABLE SOURCES
*** “Race and Mental Health Among Older Adults,” Innovation in Aging Special Issue;
*** “Moving Ahead Together: A Framework for Integrating HIV/AIDS and Aging Services” Report by Grantmakers in Aging.
4. EYES ON THE PRIZE: *** Dr. Christine Nguyen Wins Asian American Journalists Excellence Award for Radio Doc on Vietnamese Immigrants with Dementia.
1. THE BOOKMOBILE
*** Creative Care: A Revolutionary Approach to Dementia and Elder Care by AnneBasting, PhD, HarperOne (2020): On the cusp of a New Year (and hopes of a reset), a glance over the shoulder reminds us that 2020 started promisingly enough with a series of fine nonfiction books on the lived experiences of aging and caregiving.
GBONews noted Arthur Kleinman, MD’s deeply affecting memoir, The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor (Viking), since then released in paperback. And Between Heaven and Hell: The Story of My Stroke, by bestselling author and Salon.com co-founder David Talbot (Chronicle Prism, 2020), was his incisive profile in stoke recovery. Others promising titles were on the way, and then – all COVID broke loose.
Among several on aging was a title that HarperOne released in May, which felt to this editor like an especially positive title to highlight toward the start of, let’s hope, a year of promise. Creative Care: A Revolutionary Approach to Dementia and Elder Care is MacArthur fellowship “genius” Anne Basting’s memoir of developing her TimeSlips performance model of dementia care, now in more than 800 long-term care facilities. She also chronicles multiple other arts-based collaborations toward enhancing the lives of older adults across the spectrum of capabilities.
Yeah, one might say at this blunt end to a jagged season, but what has creativity done for elder death, lately? In a year when seniors account for 40% of the massive pandemic fatalities, other, everyday affronts to being old in America keep on killing with only passing notice. Take the 1,200 older adults succumbing each and every year to often preventable traffic accidents—too often as seniors try to beat the short clock across busy intersections. It shouldn’t take a genius, but it did in Milwaukee where Basting used the tricks of theater to enhance and likely save elders’ lives for years.
Basting organized a circus-like troupe that literally stopped traffic in three Milwaukee communities, safely and with a costumed, Feliniesque procession under the banner, “We’re Worth Stopping For.” It was a slogan straight from the mouth of a wheelchair bound older activist as she gave an earful to local politicians.
To create this gift to her community, Basting involved University of Wisconsin theater students, a professional drama troupe, musicians a set designer, gerontologists and local elders to take action creatively and effectively.
Capping off the demonstration politically, the Basting’s crew persuaded the mayor of Milwaukee and other public officials, who showed up at the area’s three most dangerous intersections not only to watch but – ta-dah! – to tell local media of their plans to improve senior safety. On camera, they pledged to support costly increases for new signs and public works efforts that elected budgeteers had resisted spending for years.
Basting’s Theater of Caring
As the pandemic has exposed the deadly gaps in U.S. eldercare, Basting is among the leaders in aging, who have long militated for creative approaches in serving older Americans better than the country’s medicalized, budget-hawked and ultimately failed system of health-and-social care. In developing richly collaborative projects through the arts, Basting describes a process she calls “creative care” that should not be left behind in wake of COVID-driven outcries for more long-term care funding and stronger nursing home regulation.
A meaningful old age, she and others in the creative-aging movement have shown well before the pandemic, is especially needed in our time of mass isolation and deepening ageism. And who better to engage in the job of instigating a late life worth stopping for than artists?
Basting’s book Creative Care details her innovations in numerous programs, some worthy of the best environmental of political theater productions, ranging from the Milwaukee traffic protests to full-blown productions with arts professionals, drama students, elder activists, and nursing facility residents.
In Milwaukee, her “Penelope Project,” depicted the Odyssey from the perspective of the hero’s wife in Homer’s ancient classic. Penelope’s 20 year wait for Ulysses to return, her loss and loyal isolation from many suitors and her struggle in the wake of his homecoming, embraced many themes across the ages, especially for women.
Later, working with multiple nursing homes, her performance twist on Peter Pan, which she titled, Wendy’s Neverland, recast the story with Peter’s life stalled, never wanting to grow up, and Wendy’s desire to let go of the past, so she could live life fully. It was produced in three rural homes across Kentucky.
Basting’s other projects have used social media to invite elders’ stories, such as having Meals on Wheels volunteers ask a question of the day – “If you could go anywhere, where would you go?” or “Where do you connect to nature?” – to which home-bound seniors could send responses. Some older people called in their replies and stories on a voice-mail line set up to receive replies and stories. Milwaukee public radio, WUWM, ran weekly segments on the project, and Basting’s team developed a multimedia installation in the Milwaukee City Hall atrium.
Basting writes, “The work of creative care is to bring meaning to suffering—through play and connection, through expression, through legacy. Through belonging. Through awe. Finding a way to fund this work is one key step. As the world moves toward the rippling of global rates of dementia, as we see dramatic increases in the rates of loneliness and isolation of older adults, this work will certainly not be the only change we need–especially in the United States, which has no long-term care policy and where caregivers often go without basic health care themselves or even a living wage.”
While she cites research demonstrating that creative care “has measurable therapeutic benefits,” Basting states, “It is my aim to remind us that human beings are innately creative, and that inviting our fellow human beings to be creative, to co-create, is itself and act of care and expression of love.”
Creative Care was published last May, but if you try requesting an e-book review copy from Courtney Nobile, she may still respond: Courtney.Nobile@harpercollins.com.
2. GEN BEATLES NEWS
*** Time Goes By Blogger Ronni Bennett Dies: Ronni Bennett, 79, succumbed to pancreatic cancer, which can be especially painful and debilitating. Recently Harry “Rick” Moody remembered her in his Human Values in Aging newsletter, noting that the blog, which she began in 2004, “sought to tell the truth about aging.”
Bennett, a former network television producer for the likes of The Dick Cavett Show and Barbara Walters Specials, moved westward In later life near Portland, Ore. She became incensed by her growing awareness of how little the American public knew about the lived experience of aging. She brought candor to that experience in her blogs, including that of her coping with cancer, as well as COPD. (She also included the voices of other writers in As Time Goes By.)
Her son, Tom Wark, blogged that on Oct. 30, ”Ronnie had thought it through and decided she was done fighting the pancreatic cancer that had invaded her body nearly three years ago. On Friday she consumed the Oregon-approved cocktail for ending one’s life. Just prior to departing Ronni related, ‘When you get here, it is really nice. I am not afraid.’”
Farewell to one of the braver voices to have helped to amplify issues for our aging nation.
*** “Human Rights Don’t Stop With Age,” The Age Buster (Dec. 18, 2020) by Italian journalists and sociologist Stefania Medetti.
Medetti, who tags her Age Buster blog, “Because of (not despite) our age,” is an accomplished journalist in European media on economic and cultural trends for Vogue editions and other Condé Nast Italy titles and contributes regularly to the newspaper, la Repubblica, among others. But Medetti, who lives with her family in Northern Thailand, is also, as a sociologist, who has deepened her interest in global aging and the persistence of ageism. Her blog, The Age Buster, published in English and Italian, is her monthly effort to burst stereotypes through international interviews with remarkable people.
Particularly relevant to challenging the tropes of ageism is her Dec. 18 issue with another outstanding commentator out to defy the hackneyed images of age. Medetti’s “Age Buster” for this segment was Mervyn Eastman, who hosts East London Radio’s weekly hour, AgeSpeaks, covering the politics and social conventions of elderhood.
During the segment, Eastman raised the concept of human rights and the peculiar negligence of Western culture toward its older citizens. Eastman said he interviews “people of all ages and backgrounds engaged in what I call the ‘age industry’ to challenge ageism, showing that there’s an alternative way to how we so often think about aging and care.”
Eastman’s aim: “To challenge the perpetuation of stereotypes, try to reshape, re-scope, get people to think that older adults are not somebody else. We do it through conversations, by covering all aspects of aging.”
A former social work director for British services, Eastman, 71, said he “realized that ageism exists in the age sector itself. My enemy has always been ‘compassionate ageism,’ [which is] patronizing and paternalistic, something that we need to eradicate. With this in mind, I participated in the development of the Later Life Audio and Radio Co-operative, a national network of older adults that aims to change the narrative of being old in audio and radio programming.”
The U.S. has had similar euphemisms, such as “evidence-based” practice, that while well-intentioned, can lean more toward improving professional efficiency, or at worst making systematic measurements to show changes, rather than actually enhancing care.
Like many media producers on under-covered topic areas, Eastman is an advocate and, given his weekly roster of experts, provides English reporters a likely source for research and interviews subjects. He became a founding member of Britain’s Change AGEnts Co-operative Collective and co-founder/president of the Practitioner Alliance for Safeguarding Adults, which helps health and service professionals support adults at risk of abuse.
Conceding, “we still have a long way to go,” Eastman reflected on the need for “healthy multigenerational neighborhoods, rather than think in terms of daycare spaces for older adults. We rarely think about it, but what is good for the older generations is good for young generations too.”
Another prime issue for British elders, as for hose in the U.S., is aging in place. Eastman asked, “How do we create communities that allow you to stay where you are when you’re considered in terms of the deficit, in terms of what you can’t do, instead of what you can do. When it comes to care homes, long-stay facilities, there is very little choices and freedom. We need to ask what is the nature and reality of our citizenship? How are we going to have our rights protected?”
Eastman said the essential flaw of politics is in its focus on the needs and costs of social-care, “not human rights and citizenship. The way we look at it is through the insidious perspective of ‘compassionate ageism.’” He stressed, “We have marketized, monetized and manipulated loneliness by portraying it as an issue for older people alone. Most people think that aging means ending up in a care home.”
Who tunes in? Eastman allowed, “Listeners overall run into the thousands. Clearly some shows get very few numbers whilst others run into the hundreds, but for us listenership is not the be all and end all. It is having on air a positive and challenging narrative about growing older. Through the Later Life Audio and Radio Co-operative we are hoping to encourage and train older adults to engage in the production and hosting of community radio. For instance, we are working with Newcastle University to develop a community radio run by, for, and about older adults engaging in content. We think it is particularly important to develop community radio programs that do not patronize older adults.”
AgeSpeaks, he told Medetti, resulted from a serendipitous fluke. His organization’s initial plan to establish several elder coffeehouses in London failed to click. “It was a disaster. Nobody showed up,” he said, but “one of the cafés had a studio, East London Radio.” Its founder Ian Chambers readily agreed to host AgeSpeaks and handle its production and editing. Eastman hosted the interviews monthly for the first four years, before the show went weekly. For the loquacious Eastman, the program had become “an absolute delight.”
3. RELIABLE SOURCES
*** “Race and Mental Health Among Older Adults: Within- and Between-Group Comparisons,” is a new special issue of the journal Innovation in Aging. Guest Editor Robert Joseph Taylor, PhD, MSW, of the University of Michigan, noted, “The lack of quality research on mental health for older members of racial and ethnic population groups has been a serious impediment to amassing a solid understanding of aging processes and contextual factors that are consequential for mental well-being in later life.” Expert articles explore such issues as loneliness and hopelessness; emotional risk factors, such as obesity and stress; and protective factors, among them religion and social support.
*** “Moving Ahead Together: A Framework for Integrating HIV/AIDS and Aging Services” is a recent report by the philanthropic consortium, Grantmakers in Aging subtitled, “HIV & Aging: Integrating Services to Improve Care for an Overlooked Population.” The 43-page analysis calls for a range of improvements in policy and practice that in themselves are a guide to possible stories reporters might develop on aging with HIV. Some are:
* Help geriatricians and primary care providers build their knowledge of HIV in older people, including testing, prevention, sexual health counseling, and considering HIV in diagnosis. (About 17% of new HIV infections happen among people age 50+.)
* Incorporate principles of trauma-informed care and increase cultural competency of providers and staff in all care settings, including senior centers and long-term care, to create a welcoming and inclusive atmosphere. (Trauma, stigma, and fear of rejection or being “outed” in an unfamiliar care setting can drive older people living with HIV away from treatment and into isolation.)
* Co-locate or coordinate HIV and aging services, including social work and social services, to help people manage complex care needs.
* Make existing policies more inclusive, such as adding aging issues to the federal Ending the HIV Epidemic (EHE) plan and reconsidering eligibility for aging services. (The accepted age for onset of aging in people with HIV is 50; but eligibility for many federal and state aging programs starts at 60 or older.)
The Grantmakers in Aging announcement continued, “The Framework also examines outdated assumptions about HIV, social justice issues such as racial disparities in prevalence and access to care, and parallels between the AIDS epidemic and COVID-19.
4. EYES ON THE PRIZE
*** Christine Nguyen, MD’s audio doc, “Vietnamese Immigrants Care for Parents with Dementia Amidst Stigma,” won top honors in the Asian American Journalists Association’s Excellence Awards (AAJA Radio/Audio Journalism category). Broadcast in San Francisco as a half-hour special edition of KALW public radio’s daily “Crosscurrents” magazine (May 28, 2019), the story opens with Nguyen’s personal experience with her father’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. The AAJA judges said, “Nicely produced piece, with natural weaving of current and past events together. . . . It deftly avoids similar podcast pratfalls that turns the subject and viewer relationship into one that is patronizing, overly preachy, or overly dramatic.”
Nguyen explains in the piece, “Many people don’t recognize dementia, and not recognizing it can lead to death. Most caregivers are unprepared to manage dementia in their own family. And, for many ethnic minorities, such as Vietnamese, there is little support.”
A clinical assistant professor of pediatrics at Stanford University Medical School, Nguyen is studying public health journalism at the University of Toronto. She was a 2018 Journalists in Aging Fellow of the Journalists Network on Generations (GBONews.org’s publisher) and the Gerontological Society of America, with support from the Silver Century Foundation.
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The Journalists Network on Generations (JNG), founded in 1993, publishes Generations Beat Online News (GBONews.org). JNG provides information and networking opportunities for journalists covering generational issues, but not those representing services, products or lobbying agendas. Copyright 2020 JNG. For more information contact GBO Editor Paul Kleyman.
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