Promoting mental well-being and resilience among older adults and their caregivers in Africa: Challenges and the way forward

Abstract

And so, today, we're going to be looking at promoting mental well-being and resilience among older adults and their caregivers.  We're going to address, you know, seven basic issues.  We're going to try to define the concepts.  We'll try to look at key issues about older adults and their caregivers.  People will go, why caregiving?  Why am I bringing in caregiving?  Because that is what we know in Africa.  It is what we do.  That is how we take care of older adults.  We give care.  Then we'll also try to answer the question, why address mental well-being and resilience at this time?  Why?  Then we'll look at the problems.  What are the problems that now impact on older adults that can bring about mental health issues?  Then after that, we're going to look at the common mental health issues older adults have.  How do we talk about them?  Then we'll look at the strategies.  We cannot just talk about challenges, barriers.  What can we do?  Because today you find that we can no longer call on government or call on people.  We need to start doing something ourselves.  Then we will conclude that is basically what we are, the business we have today.  And so, we're going to start with defining some of the key terms.  And we're going to look at older adults in this presentation, at persons who are 65 years and above.  Persons who are 65 years and above in this presentation, we're going to regard as older adults.  Then who are caregivers?  Caregivers are individuals who provide paid or unpaid or informal care to older adults.  Not all caregivers are paid.  Many of them today are paid to provide care to older adults, while some are family members.  So, these are the people we are going to talk about, the caregivers.  Then when we talk about mental well-being, what do we mean by mental well-being?  By mental well-being, we mean a combination of emotions, of all those issues that could make an older adult not to function very well or could make the caregiver not to function very well, not to have life satisfaction.  That is what we mean.  Issues that can affect their relationship, that can affect how they function in their day-to-day living.  That's what we are going to mean whenever we talk about mental well-being in this presentation, just note that that is what we are talking about.  Then we look at resilience.  Here we're going to see resilience as the process or the outcome by which older adults and their caregivers successfully adapt to challenging life experiences. 

HOW TO REFERENCE USING ASWDNET STYLE

Okoye U. O. (2024). Promoting mental well-being and resilience among older adults and their caregivers in Africa: Challenges and the way forward. Presentation during Wazee Day (Older Persons Day), 6 October 2023. African Journal of Social Work, 14(2), 140-148. https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ajsw.v14i3.5

Visit journal website: https://ajsw.africasocialwork.net