Human rights don’t stop with age

Compassionate ageism feeds the status quo we are trying to change 

Mervyn Eastman, founder member of Change AGEnts Co-operative Collective, co-founder and president of the Practitioner Alliance for Safeguarding Adults, and radio host

I read that Tolstoy was standing by his library when the fully formed idea of the novel Anna Karenina appeared in his mind. Less poetically, I was standing by my wardrobe when the memory of hospital disinfectant struck me a few days ago. For a fraction of a second, the pink smell of denatured alcohol surrounded me, just like it dominated the empty corridors of the hospital when I was a child. Far from being disquieting, I always found it a rounded, reassuring, ethereal fragrance. Its unexpected appearance from my olfactory collection brought back the details of an empty hospital ward in an early summer morning: the shiny light gray linoleum, the powdery blue plinth that runs along the floor, the pinewood doors with their metallic handles, and the squared neon lights that mark the roof at regular intervals. The denatured alcohol filled the place to the point that, even as a five-year-old sitting alone on a bed, I felt embraced. My parents had just left me there. They told me they would come back to visit me in the afternoon and I looked at their shapes fading away side by side in the long corridor. I spied through the sage green shutters, hoping to see them reaching their car in the parking lot many floors below. 

I learned I had to undergo an appendectomy a few days earlier as I was stepping on the white and black pebbles that decorated the town square. As I danced around on the different surfaces of the pavement, I could feel the rounded shapes of the pebbles under the soles of my shoes. My mum let the news fall with a casual tone. I was curious about having an operation. Maybe that’s why a feeling of expectation trumped the loneliness of the days I spent as a child in a women’s ward. I didn’t know how to read, so I wandered around. On some beds, a metal frame raised the blanket to prevent them from weighing down on post-surgery legs. From one of these beds, a woman tried to make me believe that the shape was, in reality, a birdcage she brought from home, bird included. She spoke with the same high pitch, a bit frivolous, of my grandmother’s older sister. I must have been in that particular time-with-no-name in which children, on the outside, pretend to believe what grown-ups say out of being polite. On the inside, their jokes tasted as sappy as a spoonful of sand. 

With a lot of time on my hands, I befriended an older child who found the lifts delightfully entertaining. When the doors slowly opened, revealing the elongated interior washed in white neon lights, she quickly pressed one button on the inside, sending it randomly up or down. Terrified of imagining my arm trapped inside the closing doors, I looked at her game in horror and awe. I remember a lot of frenzies when it turned out I had a post-surgery temperature. My mind was just busy with the idea of what I craved the most, chestnut jam. Even today, chestnut jam—such a rarity in Thailand!—is paired with the suspended loneliness of that hospital ward where pedagogy hadn’t arrived yet. We took for granted that’s the ways things were.

Talking with Mervyn Eastman, I realize as much as nobody question my being left alone in a hospital as a child, we don’t discuss as much as we should the reality of care for older adults.  We tend to thinking that it is the best possible solution. Mervyn is founder member of Change AGEnts Co-operative Collective, co-founder and president of the Practitioner Alliance for Safeguarding Adults, an organization exploring Safeguarding Adults from the perspective of professionals and others working with or to support adults at risk of abuse, independent of any particular profession. He’s also a successful radio host with his segment AgeSpeaks a weekly program that covers the politics of getting older. In our conversation, Mervyn brought up the concept of human rights, and the more I think about it, the more I wonder how is it possible that, because of a person’s age, we find the dissolution of human rights acceptable? 

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became a radio host?

I have a background as a social worker. Since I was eleven, becoming a social worker was my aspiration. My mum’s employer got me a book on this career. I remember it was illustrated with examples and it played a part in my determination to become a social worker, which I have never regretted. I got into the Welfare Department as a welfare assistant. I witnessed the issues of older adults and people with physical disabilities. I trained in childcare, mental healthcare, and people with learning disabilities as well as, of course, older adults. 

I worked as a social care director of a London Borough and then for the Government for twelve years. I realized that ageism exists in the age sector itself. My enemy has always been “Compassionate Ageism,” patronizing and paternalistic, something that we need to eradicate. With this in mind, I participated in the development of LLARC, the Later Life Audio and Radio Co-operative, a national network of older adults that aims to change the narrative of being old in audio and radio programming.

How and when did Change AGEnts and AgeSpeaks come about?

I was concerned about the power imbalance between the owner of the service and the receivers. With ChangeAGE, we moved into a coop. I’m a proud member of the coop. I’m equal to the staff, the commissioner; we called ours a multi-stakeholder coop. We aim at championing the development of social care coops, changing the narrative through changing how we think about age and aging.

Voice of the Excluded, a program for and about people of all ages and experiences by Richard O’Farrell was and remains a real inspiration to me, as does Richard himself. We thought about setting up a similar program in London and we got involved with three or four coffee shops. It was a disaster. Nobody showed up. We had originally hoped that our Old People Advisory Group could attract people, but it didn’t happen. What happened, instead, is that one of the cafés had a studio - East London Radio - and I was talking with its founder Ian Chambers who said he’d be happy to host a show. That’s how we decided to try something else and AgeSpeaks was born. Every month we talked about age-issues. Four years later, we go out every week (and daily from our playlist). I enjoy it; I love to have an audience, talking with incredible people of all ages and backgrounds engaged in what I call the “age industry” to challenge ageism, showing that there’s an alternative way to how we so often think about aging and care. Ian does the production and editing and we’re booked up until next September. It’s an absolute delight.

Can you tell us about the scope, activities, and milestones reached by ChangeAGEnts?

Sometimes, we get a very good response, listeners overall run into the thousands. Clearly some shows get very few numbers whilst others run into the hundreds, but for us listenership is not the be all and end all. It is having on air a positive and challenging narrative about growing older. Through the Later Life Audio and Radio Co-operative we are hoping to encourage and train older adults to engage in the production and hosting of community radio. For instance, we are working with Newcastle University to develop a community radio run by, for, and about older adults engaging in content. We think it is particularly important to develop community radio programs that do not patronize older adults. 

That’s what we do with AgeSpeaks. A lot of shows communicate with those who are involved in the aging industry. They think about aging in a certain way. Professors, campaign volunteers, academics, gerontologists, can bring a different perspective to civil society. We want to challenge the perpetuation of stereotypes, try to reshape, re-scope, get people to think that older adults are not somebody else. We do it through conversations, by covering all aspects of aging. 

It seems that in the UK the debate about aging and its challenges on the economic and social levels is more livelier than elsewhere. What elements make the UK so receptive to the discussion about aging?

I’m not sure we’re receptive to new narratives. It’s a journey we’re still on. Politics look out at the social care paradigm not human rights and citizenship. The way we look at it is through the insidious perspective of “compassionate ageism.” A lot of older adults buy into that and, maybe subconsciously, contribute to the perpetuation of this perspective. One of the key issues we face according to the age industry is how we respond to loneliness. “We age with that threat hanging” but in my view we have marketized, monetized and manipulated loneliness by portraying it as an issue for older people alone. Most people think that aging means ending up in a care home. We’ve got a long way to go, but we also have to challenge and change social care and what we mean by it. Betty Friedan, for example, called out "age apartheid."

Change AGEnts was created in 2010. How has the debate around aging evolved in the past ten years?

There’s a willingness in many quarters to challenge the status quo. Joyce Williams is one example. She’s very vocal about her experience as over 80. There are encouraging signs, but the most prevalent mindset is to ‘other’ and hence commodifying older people. This means starting down a road that collapses care. In the 70-80s, I was researching older adults' abuse within homes and institutions. In 1984, I was very taken by how the institutions corrupted care both emotionally and psychologically. 

We still have a long way to go. Think about the intergenerational approach. How many younger people can claim to have friends over 70 or 80 outside the family? Unfortunately, they are very few. We also need to reflect upon healthy multigenerational neighborhoods, rather than think in terms of daycare spaces for older adults. We rarely think about it, but what is good for the older generations is good for young generations too. Another issue is aging in place. How do we create communities that allow you to stay where you are when you’re considered in terms of the deficit, in terms of what you can’t do, instead of what you can do. When it comes to care homes, long-stay facilities, there is very little choices and freedom. We need to ask what is the nature and reality of our citizenship? How are we going to have our rights protected? 

How has your approach to aging changed because of your involvement in Change AGEnts and AgeSpeaks?

I was writing about ageism in my mid 20s for the British Association for Services to the Elderly. Working in a local authority Welfare Department I was struck by the issue of ageism. As a 23-year-old, I was writing about sexuality in Later Life. I covered this and other topics during the entire span of my career and my life. I have always been concerned about societal abuse, societal ageism, as my main cohort were indeed frail older adults. My career put me in touch also with my cohort of very active, campaigning, advocating, adults who were growing older healthfully. I came to realize that the spectrum of what aging looks like is very wide. Now, at the age of 71, I understand more about the breaches of human rights. I never get tired of advocating with ChangeAGE, the radio show, and my involvement with LLARC for a different way of thinking about growing old, for the need for a new narrative, and new paradigm.

I heard about your project about how Charles Dickens portrayed older adults in this fiction. What elements stand out in his representation?

Twenty years ago, I went through a challenging time of depression. I could only read and that’s how I re-discovered Dickens. I got interested in how he portrayed later life throughout his characterization of major and minor figures. I wondered, was Dickens gerontophobic? I needed to understand more about him. He was quite a fragile and immature man. At first, I was very ambitious in looking at all his characters. Now I’m working with my nephew who’s a historian. We will look at fewer Georgian and Victorian characters, but also at his own life. Does it reflect how society looked at aging, at his brutal treatment of wife Catherine when he set up with an 18-year-old actress? We must just write a series of blogs, but who knows where this work might take us. I’m also busy with a new series “Searching for Dickens” with East London radio in partnership with the Charles Dickens Museum and with the delightful Lucinda Hawksley, the great-great-great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens and other descendants who are going to discuss different aspects of the author, the journalist, the traveler, the actor.

One last question: you have a magic wand and you can address one single problem to improve the condition of the aging population. What would you do?

I would make compassionate ageism illegal. Through it we perpetuate responses without realizing that compassion feeds the status quo we are trying to change.