Ageism: A 'prevalent and insidious' health threat

Widespread beliefs about sleeping include advice on how much sleep is enough, what quality sleep means and how to achieve it, but when these pronouncements are wrong, they can do more harm than good, researchers argue.
 
It happened about a year ago. I stepped off the subway and spotted an ad on the station wall for a food delivery service. It read: “When you want a whole cake to yourself because you’re turning 30, which is basically 50, which is basically dead.”
 
After a bunch of us squawked about the ad on social media, the company apologised for what it called attempted humour and what I’d call ageism.

 

Maybe you recall another media campaign last fall intended to encourage young people’s participation in the midterm elections. In pursuit of this laudable goal, marketers invoked every negative stereotype of old people — selfish, addled, unconcerned about the future — to scare their juniors into voting.
 
Adweek called it “comically savage.” I’d drop the “comically.”
 
And such jabs constitute mere microaggressions compared to the forms ageism often takes: pervasive employment discrimination, biased health care, media caricatures or invisibility. When internalised by older adults themselves, ageist views can lead to poorer mental and physical health.
 
“It’s an incredibly prevalent and insidious problem,” said Alana Officer, who leads the World Health Organization’s global campaign against ageism, which it defines as “stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination” based on age. “It affects not only individuals, but how we think about policies.”

 
As a first step in the campaign, announced in 2016, WHO has invested half a million dollars in research. Four teams around the world are collecting and assessing the available evidence on ageism — its causes and health consequences, how to combat it, and how best to measure it.
 
Their work will appear in a United Nations report to be published within a year, and will culminate in international mobilisation, organisers hope.
One of the research groups, at Cornell University, has already completed its task, and is about to publish its study in the American Journal of Public Health. It brings surprisingly good news.

 
The team spent a year and a half sifting through dozens of articles, from the 1970s through last year, evaluating anti-ageism programs. Such efforts popped up around the country in the years after psychiatrist and gerontologist Dr. Robert Butler coined the term ageism in 1969.
 
“But are they doing any good?” asked Karl Pillemer, a gerontologist and senior author of the study. “Do interventions that purport to change people’s attitudes about ageism actually work?”
 
The researchers analysed 64 studies, most conducted in the United States, involving 6,124 participants, from preschoolers to young adults. The investigators classified about a third of the programs studied as intergenerational, meaning they created contacts between young and old that, in theory, could lessen prejudice.

 
Another third or so were educational, teaching facts about aging as a way to challenge stereotypes and myths. The remainder combined both approaches.
 

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