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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| The role of hope in psychotherapy with older adults | | Author(s) | L Bergin, S Walsh |
| Journal title | Aging & Mental Health, vol 9, no 1, January 2005 |
| Pages | pp 7-15 |
| Source | http://www.tandfonline.com |
| Keywords | Competence ; Emotions ; Psychiatric treatment ; Literature reviews. |
| Annotation | The positive impact of psychotherapy on older people's mental health problems is increasingly accepted. Three relevant bodies of literature - adult psychotherapy, hope in older adulthood, and coping with chronic and terminal illness - provide a starting point for examining the therapeutic uses of hope. However, it is argued that these literatures cannot provide a sufficiently comprehensive conceptualisation of hope in psychotherapy with older people. First, it is considered that hope in therapy is directly affected by key experiences of ageing, namely facing physical and/or cognitive deterioration and facing death. Also, these three bodies of literature have tended to dichotomise hope, as either beneficial and adaptive, or dysfunctional and maladaptive. A developmental perspective is used to critique this dichotomy, and a clinical framework is provided which examines the role and utility of hope in older adult psychotherapy from a more integrated viewpoint embedded in the client's history. The framework comprises three types of "hope work": facilitating realistic hope; the work of despair; and surviving not thriving. Suggestions are made about how this work may be carried out and with whom. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-050203215 A |
| Classmark | DPB: DL: LP: 64A |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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