Common Bad Moods Among Seniors
- By : Eileen
Generally speaking, older people show the following negative emotions and depression.
Sense of loss
A sense of loss is a feeling of loss, idleness, and confusion. Due to the change of working environment and position, the elderly psychological will produce a loss of identity, so as to show the two emotions: some are more silent, depression, and feel all things are indifferent; Some of them are irritable, prone to temper, not accustomed to the things around them, and lose their temper over little things.
There is an objective reason for this emotion, namely the change of social role. Social role refers to the status of individuals in society and community. This status or identity is acquired through study and work. The first is the duty and right of the role and the attitude and emotion of the role. The change of the role, not only means lost some rights, more important is the loss of the original role of emotion, gave up already form a habit of that kind of behavior patterns for decades. This pattern of behavior involves other people’s hopes for their identity and the hope that others have for themselves. In order to be a good character, one must know the set behavior pattern of the role and the expectations of others. Roles change and behavior patterns change. There will be a conflict between the old and new roles. Retired old people, often cannot adapt to new life rules. This is the contradiction between old and new roles. It is not easy to think that the old people are reluctant to give up and are reluctant to give up their rights. It should be seen that this is due to the loss of a long-loved job, the loss of a long-term role model and the expectations of others and others.
After retirement, the main activities of old people and the social role has changed, from work to family. their social relations and the living environment become strange, while the lively atmosphere in the past is never found again with children “leaving the nest”. The new routine often cannot be adapted, left out of the psychological feeling arises spontaneously.
Loneliness
Loneliness refers to the inner experience of an individual due to lack of social interaction needs. It often brings loneliness, neglect, and even abandonment. Loneliness is a common negative emotion in old age, and severe loneliness can lead to personality abnormality of old people, which can hinder health and even affect lifespan.
Objectively speaking, due to the distance from the social life, the physical strength fades, the movement is inconvenient, the frequency of contact with friends and relatives is decreased, the information exchange is not smooth, so it is easy to feel lonely. In the subjective aspect, the old people have their own established interpersonal communication mode, not easy to make new friends, and the interpersonal relationship is gradually narrowed, which leads to the closed psychological state. If you are unfortunate, you will feel lonely or even lonely. The widowed old man once described his state of life: “There is no speaker all day long, like a dumb man, who can hear every day without a pin.” This change in interpersonal communication is the main cause of loneliness in the elderly.
Many research data point out that most people when they are old, have a different degree of psychological loneliness. And loneliness is extremely harmful to the physical and mental health of the elderly. It can cause psychological self-sealing and reduce communication with the outside world.
Inferiority feeling
When a person’s value inferior to others, it can produce a kind of inferiority complex, because the retired, elderly people’s original social status has changed, and don’t adapt to the new social roles, which produced “it is useless”, “their social and family burden” and other strong inferiority complexes. Despite the increase in age, older people have experience, ability, but once retired, the feeling of low self-esteem often mistakenly assume that their value decreases over time. They underestimate themselves and even look down on themselves. When this sense of inferiority is formed, old people often have doubts about themselves, worry about their own feelings, and show excessive anxiety.
depression
Lost, loneliness, inferiority, doubt mood for the old people’s psychological will have a negative impact, and old people in real life is easy to suffer setbacks and not satisfactory. Unpleasant things to happen from time to time, for example, they encounter family internal contradictions and disputes, health declining, and children have difficulty in such aspects as education, employment, and marriage, many old people will become in a bad mood, agitated, or unhappy. These are all manifestations of depression.
A study has found that the prevalence of depression is 8.1% ~ 25% of older people while the percentage of having a depressed mood but not meet the diagnostic criteria is higher.
Fear
As the body ages, older people become more afraid of getting sick. On the one hand, they worry about their own life after getting sick and may bring trouble to their family and become a burden to their family. On the other hand, when old people get sick, especially when they are seriously ill, it seems that they are not far away from death. As a result, older people often have a fear of illness and death.