Last month, I was part of a panel reviewing proposals for a conference on disability and aging. One of proposals concerned the link between Down’s Syndrome and Alzheimer’s Disease. The proposal intrigued me because I wasn’t aware of the connection. And today I came across an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail exploring the very same topic. The article points out that people with Down’s are living longer, a trend that is now revealing the strong propensity of this population to develop Alzheimer’s. Medical and community support professionals are now working to develop living environments appropriate to the needs of these individuals.
This story demonstrates that society’s current practice of stovepiping disability and aging issues. The human services field is particularly guilty of this sort of thinking. Entirely separate support structures and bureaucracies are created to serve each population and there is depressingly little interaction or collaboration between the two. When a person with a disability turns age 65, they are considered “elderly” and they are shuffled into the “elderly” silo of supports, which often has a paradigmatically different underlying philosophy and set of priorities. Whereas the disability support system–at least in many states–emphasizes independence and community living, the elderly support system tends to have a greater bias towards institutional care settings.
More people with disabilities are going to live into old age (not to mention the fact that the boomer generation will probably resist efforts to label them either as disabled or elderly) and it may be time to do away with the notion that disability and aging are separate and distinct human experiences. Perhaps we should be more concerned with meeting the needs of the person rather than stubbornly clinging to outmoded categorizations and classifications.
Truer words have never been said, Mark.
This also is an important consideration in the transition from pediatric to adult medicine, Thse with childhood-onset conditions typically do not fare well in many adult medical care settings because the knowledge is limited as to the impoact of the person’s ‘condition’.
We have a loooong wat ro go.