Alcohol and Older People


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The needs of older drinkers are often ignored.

Accessing adequate support can be very tough.
Substance misuse is normally seen as an issue for young people and a lot of the focus is on the users of crack and opiates whose behaviours draws them into the criminal justice system. This ignores huge numbers of older people for whom a drink is something that is needed to get them through everyday life. As people get older the impact of alcohol on the system changes and levels of drinking that were relatively harmless become dangerous. There exists also a large population of people who have been drinking at hazardous levels for many, many years, have no intention of stopping and just want to be left in peace. Workers often find them very difficult to deal with and get frustrated that they are unable to help the people change.
Estimates vary widely: Alcohol Concern claims the following:
• “More than 1,000,000 over-65 year-olds are drinking at unsafe levels – representing a 75% increase among women and a 31% rise among men over the past decade.”
• “In Britain around 23% of men and 8% of women over the age of 60 (approaching two million people) endanger their health by regularly drinking above the recommended guidelines, with over two and a half million people drinking at least 5 days a week. This figure may be even higher because many older people under-estimate their drinking - missing out some alcoholic drinks which they regard as ‘medicinal’.

An invisible group

Very little is known about how much older people drink. Their problems tend not to be so public. We don’t often see 70 year olds causing issues with binge drinking in town centres on a Friday night. They are much less likely to cause problems to their neighbours and are also less likely to ask for help. So they don’t get any.
When people do go to the doctor, as they do not fit into the stereotype of the heavy drinker it just gets missed and symptoms are put down to old age.

Sheer bloody prejudice

Old people experience prejudice on a regular basis and their ability to receive resources is limited by what the worker believes. These attitudes are often condescending:
• ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’
• ‘what else can you expect at that age?’
• ‘she has had a hard life, she deserves her cherry brandy.’
• ‘you can’t take it away, it’s all she has got left.’
And there is simple embarrassment. It is common amongst younger people to find it hard to imagine that their parent’s generation could have done drugs, alcohol or sex. It is harder still to imagine that they may still want some more – that the desires of the 20 year old in some way become indecent or disgusting when experienced by a 60 year old or an 80 year old. ‘it’s disgusting, they should have stopped that years ago.’
As a result, the worker’s sense of shame or decency may get in the way of them asking simple diagnostic questions or addressing issues that may enhance the quality of someone’s life.

Objectives

By the end of the course, participants will be able to: -
◦ Describe how the impact of alcohol on the system changes with age
◦ Identify how symptoms caused by drinking may be confused with health issues associated with ageing
◦ Clarify how a client feels about their drinking
◦ Support someone to minimise the harm caused by their drinking choices
◦ Involve other professionals when appropriate
Length –1 day

Who will benefit from this course

This course will be useful for all workers who have clients with alcohol problems and counsellors in particular.

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Please note
All our courses are commissioned for groups and organisations. If you have more than three people who would benefit from working together on this topic, use the link at the the bottom of the page to contact me, or click here to find out more about getting us to deliver a programme.

We regret that we do not have an open access programme