Outra compreensão da velhice, da Psicologia

Abstract

Aging has become an increasingly visible and worrying phenomenon for countries and scientists around the world. Due to the decrease in birth rate and mortality, the advancement of technologies, mainly medicine, and migratory processes, old age has grown significantly around the planet, being more acute in developed countries, which already show concerns about the scarcity of resources available for this sector in the coming decades and the increasingly extensive demands. Today humanity tries to restrict some of its manifestations and consequences by resorting to local, national and international programs. World organizations began to address the issue at the end of the 1970s and proposed objectives and measures aimed at improving the quality of life, health care and social security, and establishing social support systems for the population. older adult population. Working on the topic privileges a conception of development, implies reevaluating the biological and medical-physiological criteria that have emphasized the vision of old age as deterioration, illness and death. Thus, this article provides a psychosocial understanding of old age, by emphasizing the human and subjective nature of the aging process and focusing on the broad development possibilities that the course of life offers us up to this sociopsychological moment.