Study: Speaking down to elderly can shorten their lives

FLORENCE - A recent study by Yale University shows speaking down to the elderly can cut years off their lives.

Dr. Marian Dehlinger, medical director of the gero-psychiatric unit at Cedar View Behavioral Health, affiliated with Carolinas Hospital System, said while she has not seen “elderspeak” take years off a person’s life, she has seen it have a detrimental effect on a person’s quality of life and their perception of themselves.

“I absolutely agree that using that infantile speech with the elderly can have a negative effect on them,” she said.

Dehlinger said elderly patients often already have issues related to their health and social circle that changes their definition of themselves.

“Most of them that I see in the unit or in my practice have had to move into assisted living or with their families, which is a loss of their independence,” she said. “When they come and they are under our care and they are in this dependent role anyway, we can fall into this trap of using language and behaviors that can validate in their mind these negative views that they are helpless.”

It’s a cycle that leads to decreases in self-esteem through negative reinforcements, Dehlinger said.

“There is a way to be empathetic when you take care of them in a way that is respective and without using baby language,” she said.

Often, some of the behaviors of people in that age group can elicit a knee jerk reaction in people, which leads them to try to “mother” elderly family members and friends, Dehlinger said.

“When they come in here, it is very tempting for staff to say (things like) ‘Oh, you’re such a sweetie,’ or ‘Don’t you look pretty today?’” she said. “That increases that sense that they have that they are helpless.”

Margaret Coker of Hartsville has seen first-hand how “elderspeak” can affect patients with dementia. Her husband, Dan, died at the age of 65 because of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.

Now, Coker uses the experience to help organize caregiver support groups in Hartsville and Darlington.

She said it was hard for her husband right after he got the diagnosis, because he didn’t understand why things he used to know were suddenly so hard for him to remember.

“In the beginning of the Alzheimer’s, my husband knew he had it and something was wrong but he didn’t know what,” Coker said.

After a while, the disease progressed to a point where he didn’t realize there was anything different about him at all.

“I can remember sitting on the porch with my husband and he said, ‘I’m supposed to be taking care of you,’” Coker said.

Dehlinger said those types of statements prove what caregivers say and how they react to the patient does have an effect.

“You just have to keep in mind that they are adults,” she said. “They are not babies and you cannot treat them that way.”

For more details about Coker’s caregiver support groups, call her at (843) 332-7478.