A Psychological History of Ageism and Its Implications for Elder Suicide

Abstract

The contemporary Western world is rife with explicit and implicit forms of ageism or prejudice and discrimination against persons on the basis of age. According to the standard gerontological narrative, our contemporary ageist attitudes arose as an effect of the technological, social, and political changes that ushered in the modernist era. This chapter offers an alternative account by grounding these historical events in underlying changes in the psychological life of humanity. This view affords a larger perspective, identifying ageism as rooted in the existential fear of death, which developed from the emergence in the twelfth century of a sense of individual self as separate from the collective. It would find expression in and nourishment from the development of linear perspective vision and printed media in the fifteenth century and consolidation later in scientific and philosophical developments. In our contemporary situation, longer life spans, a growing population of elders, and increasing medical expenses are prompting conversations about rational suicide. These conversations would do well to situate themselves within the larger perspective of a psychological historical view, considering ways in which the rational act may be grounded in the culture’s hidden assumptions.