NCHPAD has a new focus area in the form of Disability & Aging.
Visit us at nchpad.org to get resources on aging into disability,
aging with a disability, and contact us for any information you would like to see around this topic.
In this video learn more about aging with a disability with Dr. Ivan Molton.
So my name is Ivan Molton. I am an associate professor here at the University of Washington.
And I am a psychologist by training.
How you define aging with a disability is pretty challenging,
because of course, we're all aging all the way across the lifespan.
Some people who have, and I'm gonna say it's disability, right,
which is, I know a complicated term in itself
have only experienced disability or impairment for few years.
And so they don't think of themselves as aging with a disability even though they're older adults.
We have to make some lines.
You know, did you have a health condition before you were about age 40,
That is now causing some difficulties, impairments, challenges in your physical functioning?
And are you over the age of 60?
If so, we would describe you as aging with a disability.
Some people who are 90 and are
experiencing a lot of impairment say,
"Yeah, but just because I'm 90, and everyone is experiencing impairment, I don't see myself as aging with disability. "
Mostly we let people define it for us.
The distinction is really about people who are aging into a disability versus those who are aging with a disability.
It's a hard line to make, but people who have
some new onset of disability kind of after age 65,
like a stroke, or, you know, a fall that results in a brain injury
or you know, these kinds of conditions, those folks just
don't have the same background, as somebody who's lived their
entire life with physical difficulties that are associated with disability.
We're really trying to separate those two groups because they're, they have some
important differences kind of Psychosocially, but where you
draw the line as a matter of debate.
I mean the issues when you're talking about aging
with a disability of any kind,
are mostly about the fact that
your body has been functioning a certain way for a very long time.
And you're going to now start to experience perhaps
additional kind of body related complications.
So if you're a person who uses a manual wheelchair and you've
been wheeling for 40 years, you might start to develop osteoarthritis of the shoulder.
If you're a person who's had a particular posture,
due to a condition, and you've been
leaning a certain way, for a very long time, you might start
to experience some inflammation and some chronic back pain associated with that,
which could then contribute to poor sleep,
which then can contribute to mood issues and you know, other kind of problems.
So it's mostly about kind of the duration of symptoms in that way.
So that's one aspect of it.
And then the other aspect is that as people with disabilities
get older, their care networks get older, too.
People with disabilities have the same aging concerns everybody else does.
They've got to take care of their parents, often.
They might have to take care of their
parents at the same time that they're raising small children, right.
So they call that "sandwich generation".
But they have this additional complexity of that they often require some support,
whether that's physical help, you know, all the way up through
what we would call caregiving or care, partnering, help, and as
neighbors and friends and family and that informal network starts
to get older, that starts to drop away.
So people find themselves facing more physical challenges in their health with less support around them.
And then there's the other reality
that for a lot of people with CP, and other conditions depending
on the severity and nature, they may not have had the same work history.
We know that people with disabilities...
We don't have enough support and employment in my opinion.
So I would describe them as underemployed.
Which means that when you get to later age and retirement age, there's now
suddenly a financial pinch.
So it's kind of a perfect storm problem regardless of the condition that you've got.
You've got worsening of what they describe as
secondary health conditions, pain, fatigue, spasticity,
you've got new health conditions that are emerging, just with age
like potentially diabetes, dyslipidemia, these kinds of issues.
Then on top of that, you might have a financial strain
and you suddenly find that your your care net work starts to get smaller.
And so it's that kind of combination that that puts
people who are aging with a disability at risk.
And I think that's true, really across the diagnoses.
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