Addressing Stigma Around Cognitive Decline

Discussing how societal attitudes affect the elderly’s willingness to seek help for cognitive health issues

One of the greatest failures of our time is deeming warning, blaring signs of trouble as ‘normal’ for the sake of preventing the avail of professional services or outside help. Time and again, mental health issues have gone ignored as individuals dismiss them as ‘hormonal’ or attribute them to different phases in a person’s life. Similarly, cognitive issues faced by the elderly in the form of rapid decreases in memory, retention power, and poor hand-eye coordination, are labelled as ‘inevitable’ in the face of ageing. This discourages senior citizens and their families from seeking assistance out of what seems to be a lack of necessity. This falsified sense of normalcy can have long-lasting, detrimental issues, often compounding in its harmful nature.

A larger part of this issue stems from a current generational gap in ideas and values. The elderly has often grown up at a time where cognitive issues were not openly discussed. Extremely traditional backgrounds may view mental and cognitive health issues as well as associated diseases such as Dementia as weaknesses, preventing the facilitation of healthy discourse on the topic. Often, ancient languages lack translations for ‘Alzheimer’s’ and ‘Dementia’ making it harder for both caregivers and the elderly to accept and act on their conditions.

The psychological barrier is extreme; senior citizens fear that going to community events or engaging in cognitively stimulating activities would attach them to a specific group or label of people. In some emerging economies, these senior citizen centres are often viewed similarly to older-age homes, which carry an immense amount of societal weight in terms of associated shame, guilt, and betrayal. Older age homes, historically, are thought to be places where the elderly is neglected by their children in these developing countries that for generations, have propagated the benefits of a joint family system and inter-generational dependence.

These societal attitudes suppress cognitive issues that should be surfaced and discussed. Their immediate consequence lies in the mind of senior citizens who stay silent about signs their bodies give them and follow along conversations about matters that have no recollection of. With the risk of losing the sharpness of memories or the memories altogether, they face the threat of other individuals creating their own memories and depicting past events in different perspectives. This can be confusing, deceptive, and frustrating, so it is imperative that they are able to preserve and talk about their memories for as long as they can, with the highest extent of clarity possible.

At the Mind Mosaic, this is one of our primary objectives. Our carefully curated decks of activities are designed to trigger pattern recognition abilities, exercise existing memory, and strengthen retention power.