Aged Care Insite Issue 114 | Aug-Sep 2019 | Page 25

practical living it is easy to deprive them of the rights of that society. So, with all of this, would it be a leap to say that the way we have historically talked about the elderly informs the apparent mistreatment we have seen aired at the royal commission? “I think that’s not an unfair way of putting it,” Crichton says. “But the real force of what you said comes in when one considers the language that you’re referring to as a way of dividing the world up into meaningful bits. “Because if the only options you have as a person of a certain age is to be in one of several categories, all of which cast you as having limited capacities or diminishing competencies and certain kinds of attractiveness, if the only categories available to you to be a member of society are in different ways denigrating, marginalising, disempowering, then that’s who you are going to be.” And apart from the way in which people are physically treated, research has shown that ageism and ageist language can negatively affect the health outcomes of those who experience it. Researchers have found that negative ageing stereotypes have a direct influence on cardiovascular stress, and positive ageing stereotyping interventions can protect individuals. Language-based age discrimination is often covert, and there is little written about it. Crichton believes that it is a case of language failing to keep up with a society where the way we age has changed. “The role of people over a certain age is also changing rapidly, so essentially, on about five or six fronts – social, economic, linguistic, health, longevity – we’re playing catch-up simultaneously,” he says. “I think language is coming to light as being important in this because it’s important across all the other areas. You can’t articulate policy without language. You can’t create products and create markets without language. You can’t brand or provide care without language.” Crichton describes language as deep infrastructure, as the “dark matter” of any change in society. Social psychologist Sik Hung Ng has said that language is power, and that discrimination cannot be alleviated Studies looking into ageist language have found that we ‘dehumanise’ the elderly with language, ‘thereby making it easier to oppress this group’. nor fully understood without language. Crichton agrees. “It’s not about expressing opinions about elderly people or older people, it’s about the options that you’re giving people within which they can meaningfully be anything in a society, and that’s what language does,” he said. ■ OCTO BER agedcareinsite.com.au 21