Considerations in Counseling Elderly Persons

Throughout the large array of helping professions there runs one common thread. It is the presence in all of them of a relationship between a person who recognizes at some level a need for the skills, sensitivity, and concern of an individual who possesses a potential ability to help them with a problem. For those who work with aging persons, the needs resulting from the many stresses of growing old in our society often demand consummate technical skills, acute sensitivity, and the ability to recognize the additional stress placed on older persons when they acknowledge a need for assistance in areas of life that have often been free of problems in the past. In working with the elderly person it is often the presence or lack of sensitivity that allows the application of needed technical or professional skills. All too often, the elderly person requires some form of relationship with the service professional that evolves into the provision of some form of counseling as precursor or adjunct to the delivery of the expertise for which the older person has been referred. When the service provider has had little or no training or supervised experience in this aspect of their role, the effect of this crucial component of service delivery may be attentuated. Therefore, it will be the focus of this article to discuss counseling of elderly persons as both a primary and secondary focus of professional intervention, and to examine some important considerations, strategies, and other factors that affect successful use of these techniques. Every instance of counseling elderly people relies most heavily on qualities that cannot be taught—empathy and genuine concern for one's fellow human being. Without these basic elements, the impact of counseling will be limited, no matter how great the technical expertise or knowledge of the literature. This article furthermore, is not offered as a definitive treatise that can produce instant expertise. Additional reading will be very helpful in understanding personality, aging phenomena, responses to disability or illness (acute or chronic), as well as other variables that influence the behavior and biopsychosocial reality of each aging person or groups of elderly individuals. T h e references at the end of this article are a good point of departure in the process of further knowledge in this area. Finally, it is assumed that the reader will recognize the importance of quality of counseling activities as being a more important factor than any sweeping definitions of who ought to provide these services, since trained mental health counselors who work with the aged are often unavailable in many communities (President's Commission on Mental Health: Task Panel on the Elderly, 1979).